thoughts…

It’s as enjoyable as the “First Law” trilogy; he stills has that fascination for broken / crippled characters (but as every reviewer mentioned them it’s only natural he sticks to what’s been working) — and unsurprisingly this book is quite similar to his others.
2/3rds of the book along, there is some sort of plot twist (which is presented in a nifty fashion) but seems to have no basis in the motivation of the characters (i.e. they seem to act contrarian to their interior motivations only to serve the slight twist that has some repercussions later on).
Anyway, don’t let that stop you, it’s still a rather gory and dirty fantasy romp. The overall world / setting is one I quite enjoy, especially the background with the Valint & Balk vs the prophet and his eaters.

While solid-state drives (SSDs) seem to be all the rage in net-/laptops at the moment, most of their advantages (mostly negligible access times) also make sense for a desktop system, whereas their disadvantages (price / small size) are not as constricting as you can have multiple physical discs in a desktop system.
I’ve bought a 64GB SLC SSD drive in a 3.5″ SATA version for my Mac Pro and use it solely as an OS and applications drive, while my home-directory (where the bulk of my data obviously sits) is still on a normal, spacious hard-drive. The speed-up (in spite of Mac OS X’s already quite fast boot / application start-up times) is very noticeable.
The OS migration from the HDD to the SDD was very painless. I used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy everything but my username’s home directory, rebooted from the SSD, logged in as the user with administration privileges (which your everyday user account shouldn’t have) and changed the home-directory for my non-admin user (under System Preferences – Accounts – Right-Click on the account – Advanced Options – Home Directory).
Almost all applications (baring Xcode) cold-start approximately half-way through the first Dock-icon bounce and World of Warcraft flies with this setup.
If I didn’t need more than 64GB total space on my MacBook Pro, I’d also fit it with such an SSD drive without hesitation. But as it is, I need more space. Alas, when the next laptop is on the horizon I can definitely see myself shelling out for an SSD upgrade. Maybe mainboards should come with something like 64GB of on-board flash for use as operating system and application drive…

WowPlot has been updated to version 0.1.3, featuring support for the new 3.0.2 combat log events (and subsequently removing support for 2.4.3 ones).
Only tested with a single Kara log, so please get in touch if you’re having trouble with new logs.

As I was trying to clear out the folders of the mailing lists I’m subscribed to on my mail account (Apple’s MobileMe, née .Mac), I ran into a bit of a problem: I couldn’t delete any messages from some of the folders; it always failed with a timeout error from the server. These folders were usually quite populated (e.g. ~19,000 messages from cocoa-dev). After contacting support chat, and trying many things both in Mail.app as well as MobileMe’s web-app, my case got escalated.
As it turns out, nested IMAP folders are the culprit! It doesn’t matter if the folders in question are at the top-level, just having any nested folders in the account seems to trigger the “slow path” that leads to the problem.
Now my folder structure is a mess with oddly prefixed folder names, but at least it’s flat, and I can work with my emails again.

TL;DR version: Don’t nest folders on MobileMe’s IMAP servers, stick to a flat hierarchy.

WowPlot has been updated to version 0.1.1, featuring the following improvements:

• loading / saving of plots
• more speed (back-end is now multi-threaded using NSOperation)
• Sparkle auto-updating
• better parsing
• some error-messages
• more consistent splitting

WowPlot is a graphical analysis tool for World of Warcraft® combat logs (compatible only with the new combat log format introduced in version 2.4). Its main focus lies in evaluating time-dependant combat performance in a very free-form fashion, which is in contrast to the mainly statistical approach of other tools.

WowPlot requires Mac OS X Leopard (10.5) and is a Universal application.

Xbox 360 #5 died yesterday evening with the red ring of death, two days before the launch of Halo 3…

I am not amused! :/

…because otherwise you accidentally start supporting things like this; Dave formulates what I feel quite succinctly.

Work is keeping me fairly busy (preparing for a conference in Toulouse), and not that much terribly exciting has happened. I (un-)am patiently waiting for my Mac Pro (having chosen a decent 3D card as well as 802.11 has moved the ETA to mid-September), Rhythm Tengoku (Rhythm Heaven) is great (I am still looking for the song from the festival-stage), and Chromehounds is regularly taking up my evenings.

This game has gotten very unfair reviews, founded on its mediocre single-player mode, but the squad-based persistent online war redeems it (although there still are a number of annoying bugs left to be ironed out by the upcoming patch). The way in which it encourages teamplay is cleverly designed, and it is the main reason I play. There is nothing else like it. If your are looking for a twitch-shooter, stick to Halo 2, but if you’re lusting for something more strategic and substantial (with endless options for building your own mech), this might be for you. Some comments from Penny Arcade might help explain what makes this game good.

I’ve been reading the more recent chapters of the Yokohama Shopping Log manga by Ashinano Hitoshi this evening. It made me cry (again!). Thus, I have to implore you — whoever you may be — to read it and be moved. Because it’s just that good. It isn’t for everyone, but you ought to have at least tried.
There is an excellent Wikipedia article that can give you an idea of the series. If you’re still interested in reading, start your journey here and then move here for the more recent chapters.

Crash is a great, “serious” film, but not without humour, exhibiting many tightly interwoven stories revolving around racial stereotypes and miscommunication. It feels a bit reminiscient of Magnolia in its way of story-telling, but in a good way.
Touching and very recommended.

A fast connection is really nice:

I’ve been playing a bit of “God of War” recently and it feels very epic. Still waiting for my “Killer 7″ from Play.com (which is taking 9 days now ).
Have also started dabbling a bit in Cocoa (with Aaron Hillegass‘ book). The current plan for applications is something to convert the escaped international names generated by BOMArchiveHelper to proper unicode, maybe port my wavelet image compression code, and for testing out CoreData an anime fansub collection database / management app. Time permitting, of course…