soledad penadés

As they always say, good things always come in threes (or in Spanish: ¡No hay dos sin tres!). So here’s the third batch of demo sources! This time it’s the turn for PPG05: Codecolors. The only demo that will fully test your monitor’s ability to display the full gamut of colors, by showing them all at the same time!

Best of all, it’s even captured to HD video so that you can watch it in glorious High Definition. It can’t get any better. Or maybe you can — if you do anything with the code, as always, let me know!

I have also changed a bit the way the builds are done and tidied the root folder up. Now both the Mac and Linux versions of BASS dynamic library are in the src/bass folder, and get copied to the right destination only if needed. There’s also support for building the Mac bundles right from the command line, thanks to an awesome bundle.sh script which the guys from glfw did and that I modified in order to include an icon too. So you don’t need to mess with XCode and its awkward project settings for compiling, and everything can be done from the Makefile. Hooray!

I still have to update the Makefile for PPG01 so that it generates Mac builds and also follows the same location for BASS that these latest builds use, but I’ll probably do it tomorrow. My eyelids won’t allow me to do it now, I’m afraid!

My laptop is running Mac OS X 10.5.7 –i.e., the seventh revision of their overhyped operating system– and Apple still doesn’t know how to deal with network issues properly. If it’s not the dreaded “Your wireless network has been compromised” error, it will be this new and absurd behaviour: you close your laptop’s lid, leave it to sleep, come back the next day, open the lid again and… surprise! the laptop is unable to reconnect to the same network it was connected to some hours before! The only explanation: Connection timeout, once and once again.

As you may easily deduct, there haven’t been any changes at all to my router’s configuration, so with all other factors remaining the same, why should it stop working?

Searching for answers to that question unveils a crazy painting spattered everywhere with mystifying cargo-cult affirmations. First comes the number one mac-advice:  repairing permissions, which seems to be the magic fix-it-all for all mac-pains (although it doesn’t seem to be related to anything else than applications which are not properly installed). There’s also the classic it’s not me, it’s you argument, also known as it’s probably a fault in your router’s configuration, and that, as expected when trying to give subjective explanations to an objective fact, can be translated to a myriad of reasons:

• you’re using { nothing | WEP | WPA | WPA2 } but you should be using { nothing | WEP | WPA | WPA2 }
• you need to update your router’s firmware
• you need to select a different wifi channel
• your router is incompatible with your computer
• you need to reset your router’s and computer’s configuration and start anew

Obviously all of them are useless, since the fault is not in the router but in the computer itself, miserably unable to rejoin the very same network it was using before going to sleep.

However, since cargo cult is so tempting, solutions multiply, like loaves and fishes. No one seems rational, and worse of all, you feel like there’s nothing else you can do but surrender and try them all, or at least consider them for a second — such is the absurdity of the Mac world:

• You can’t have Bluetooth activated at the same time than an Airport card. “Then I will need to sacrifice my wireless mighty mouse”, argues another person whose mac doesn’t behave as expected. But Jobs sayeth: “in life, thou shalt need to make choices, painful as they are”.
• You need to archive and reinstall
• Or even worse: you need to start from scratch, and reinstall Leopard in an empty disk
• You need to create a new user, log in with that account and then try to connect to the wireless network, to discard it’s not a problem with the former user account (like if the router had developed a certain animadversion to that user)
• You need to activate and deactivate Airport (probably inherited from Windows)
• You need to open Keychain Utility, delete every appearance of your Network passwords, log out and try again
• Same but restart and try again (very Windows style)
• You need to remove some arcane com.apple.* property lists from the /Library/Preferences folder. Oh wait, or was it in ~/Library/Preferences? Never mind, log out, or restart, and try again.
• You need to make sure that System Preferences.app is in the /Applications folder (I would have thought that the main point of bundles was to be able to have apps wherever one wanted to place them, but if this one is true, it would prove another of their magic features false)
• Then there’s the most bizarre solution of all: open Safari and type in your favourite address. Since the computer is not connected to any network, it will suggest you to run the Network diagnostics utility. Then select Airport, and choose your favourite network name, and it might connect. In fact, I tried this one, and it “worked”, but just once, and I think it was just a coincidence, because the next time I tried, following the very same sequence of steps, it didn’t work again.

And it’s not like my computer’s hardware is new  and the drivers aren’t totally fine tuned yet (Apple is well known by the unreliability of the first versions of each computer model). It is a 2005 PowerBook, which is one of the last models in that family of products, before they got replaced with the MacBookPro. I would expect Apple to know an awful lot about their own hardware — after all, that’s their whole selling point: since we are the ones that build and program it, It Just Works™.

But they don’t seem to know that much (maybe their China assemblers are keeping some juicy bits to themselves), and it just doesn’t work.

It is a natural-born traveller: I had owned it for less than one month and was already travelling to Barcelona with it; next came several more visits to different cities, in Spain (Madrid, Valencia, Seville) or in Europe indistinctly (Frankfurt, Helsinki). It even was my commuting companion during the month that I was working in Wokingham (although we could never play with T-mobile’s train wi-fi service) and also came with me to Sundown and barcamplondon2! And I’m not even detailing minor, local moves…

But some weeks ago it was playing a plain AVI and it suddenly got absolutely frozen. I began to blame Leopard, since everything has been kind of awkward since I upgraded to it. I restarted it, played the video again and luckily it finished playing without freezing. I left it there and went for some coffee; when I came back it was frozen again! No response whatsoever to mouse moves or key presses. Something was really wrong there and I kept believing it was Leopard’s fault.

I immediately began to look for info about Ubuntu on powerpc mac’s. It’s not a very positive experience; powerpc macs are not very mainstream nowadays (or so that seems) and so they are not part of the main ubuntu distribution. The powerpc port is maintained by volunteers and not officially endorsed or supported by Canonical. Not that it makes it unusable but it’s somehow less shiny. There are other distributions which do support powerpc, but I am not too keen on changing: I like Ubuntu.

Anyway, while I decided about ubuntu or not, I thought about having a look at the powerbook’s system logs. Ahhh the horrible sight I found!

14:23 disk0s3: I/O error

(… lots more stuff…)

16:48 disk0s3: I/O error

Or what is the same: each time the computer had got frozen, there had been an I/O error. Not nice…

All the searches pointed to one and only solution:

Back up your data and replace the hard disk as soon as possible!

Since I don’t really like to give my computers to strangers for them to be fixed, I decided I was going to replace the hard drive myself, just as I did with my mac mini.

What you’ll need

First thing was to look for info on how to do that. This is the main page I used: ifixit. It is very clearly explained, including the required tools one would need. I only had to buy a Torx 06 screwdriver for the two hexagonal-like screws on the keyboard side, since I already had Philips screwdrivers.

The guide is very complete and the only thing it’s missing is some geek-porn details of the powerbook interiors, so I’ll just complete it with that and some remarks:

Apart from the hard disk (a SATA disk, not a SATA2 disk) and the screwdrivers, there’s something else which you will need and no one speaks about: STRENGTH!!!

I was lucky mr.doob was there when I needed to remove the screws which hold the hard drive to the chassis. They are extremely tight and I wouldn’t have been able to finish the replacement without his help. All the other screws are quite tight and hard to remove, having a dismaying tendency to tear up when trying to unscrew them, specially the ones which need the Torx driver (in the keyboard area). They almost ruined the screwdriver!

I would say replacing the hard drive in a powerbook is way more tedious and scary than replacing the mini’s hard drive. Things are very tight and tiny, and you have the general feeling that you’re going to break it, so I don’t recommend it if you’re not a patient person.

Hands on!

First thing I did was putting a nice kitchen towel on the table, to avoid scratching the cover of the laptop. You can use whichever type of towel or soft surface you like of course!

Then the guide recommends removing the battery using a coin, but if you have a wood clothes peg handy, do use it! That way you’ll avoid leaving marks in the metal. Example:

Once you remove the battery begins the monumental task of removing the incredible amount of screws that this little machine has. For not losing a single one, I placed them in a big notebook like this:

It’s interesting and perhaps the reason for them to be so terribly tight that there’s some kind of blue mass at the end of some screws, like if it was glue or something. If you know what it is, please let me know. I’m intrigued.

After a thousand screws, you’ll be able to access the compact and tight interior. Be very careful when removing the keyboard, take as much time as you need and don’t use too much of your strength for that, or you may tear the connection to the motherboard quite easily (I almost did – and it was a truly terrifying moment!).

The hard drive is right underneath the touchpad, surrounded by the battery and the optical drive on left and right respectively:

And as I said you might need help for these screws if your hands are not extraordinarily strong. Once you remove them you still need to carefully remove that orange tape which keeps the hard drive connected to the motherboard. Here’s a close up just for the sake of it:

There’s still another piece of orange tape to remove on the left of the hard drive. See my thumb here for having a sense of the scale of this operation:

When you finish with these details you can remove the hard drive from its place but there’s still some work to be done.

And guess what… there are more screws to remove!

The hard drive it’s surrounded by a piece of plastic, which is fixed to the hard drive with those extra screws. I’m guessing it is for insulating it from static electricity or something like that; otherwise it doesn’t make much sense.

Remove the other cushioned piece on the bottom of the disk but do not throw it away, the new hard drive still needs it:

You still need to disconnect the little piece of circuit board on top of the hard drive, which in fact connects to the motherboard. Be very careful when disconnecting this piece or you may destroy a pin or two (and say bye to your laptop!).

Then you just connect the new hard drive to the little circuit board thing, wrap the disk with the awkward piece of plastic, put the screws back, put the hard drive back to its place:

Do not forget about the motherboard connection … and the orange tape ;-)

Fnally the little cushioned piece on the right:

And back to screwing on!

After all the screws are in their place comes the scary moment – will it still work? As I had used this disk for cloning my mac mini’s hard drive, it had an intel boot image, which the powerbook’s powerpc chip didn’t like very much. So it gave me a big kernel panic as you can see:

But nothing that a good install of Mac OS couldn’t fix!

I have had the computer running for a couple of weeks already and I must say it’s working perfectly. So if your powerbook’s disk fails and you feel brave enough, do replace it yourself! :-)

Desde hace unos meses hay una duda que me asalta y me quita el sueño (o casi): ¿Mac o dell?
Toda la culpa la tiene la apertura de la tienda Apple en Londres, y mi visita a ella. Aquello fue la perdición… Yo había pensado, antes de ir allí, que mi próximo portátil sería un dell, un sony vaio o un samsung extra-lite de esos tan chachis pirulis, pero aún no lo tenía muy claro, la verdad. Sólo me faltaba ver aquellos ordenadores eye-candy para acabar de marearme…
El caso es que no debería ser tan complicado decidirse, una vez pones los requisitos tan sólo hay que buscar un ordenador que los cumpla, ¿no? Quiero un ordenador que vaya mejor que el que tengo (¡eso no será muy complicado!), que no pese y que no haga ruido (el maldito ventilador me pone de los nervios).

• Con que vaya mejor que el que tengo me refiero a que no se recaliente la tarjeta gráfica cuando le apetezca, que funcionen las teclas siempre (de vez en cuando le da por no funcionar la tecla del menor/mayor “< >” y la de cerrar llave “}“, cosa bastante MOLESTA), que tenga más resolución de pantalla -sólo tengo 1024×768 y la verdad es que necesito espacio por todas partes, ando todo el día plegando y desplegando toolbars- y que en general tire más rápido. En esto supongo que todos pasarían la prueba: a los dell hay que hacerles mucha judiada para que las tarjetas potentes hagan saltar el ventilador (ni me planteo comprar uno con una tarjeta de chipset intel, ¡eso es bazura!, o una ati o una geforce decentes), la pantalla se puede configurar a medida y puedes elegir resoluciones tochas rollo 1600×1200, los vaio también tienen pinta de tener buena resolución y además la calidad del tft tienen buena pinta -esas pantallas ultrablack aparentan un contraste excelente- y alguien me habló bien de los samsung pero este dato no lo tengo muy confirmado. Así que en cuanto a rendimiento, en cuanto a orden de credibilidad estarían dell, vaio y samsung. La parte de evaluar el rendimiento con los macs la tengo bastante complicada. En el trabajo utilizo de cuando en cuando un powerbook antiguo y no me parece en absoluto una medida fiable (es un trastito!). Y si le pregunto a cualquiera de mis mac-amigos (es decir: Silenci, Madgoblin, Drumu…) la única respuesta que me saben dar es: PC KK! Cómprate un mac! De modo que su opinión está totalmente sesgada y tienen el cerebro sorbido por Apple. ¡Y yo me quedo sin datos fiables respecto a los mac! Evidentemente me interesa bastante este aspecto; si por algo me quiero cambiar este portátil es porque me desespera que cuando le pido potencia tenga que apagarlo un ratito para que se enfríe. Y cuidado a ver qué hago con la gráfica, no sea que se vuelva a quemar y tenga que tenerlo en el servicio técnico otros tres meses (más visitas y cabreos con el gilipollas de turno aparte). ¡Este portátil en lugar de facilitarme la vida me la complica! (Nunca os compréis un acer)
• Respecto al peso, se ha convertido también en algo importante para mí. ¡Paso de partirme la espalda por llevar un ordenador a cuestas! Me parece que en esto los Mac llevan las de ganar. Estuve viendo los pesos (y eso que aquí los maqueros acérrimos no pueden influenciar en el resultado: un kilo es un kilo sea de mac o de pc…) e incluso levanté un par de portátiles en la tienda Apple. No me podía creer lo poco que pesaban. Seguro que con el cargador incluido pesan menos que mi portátil actual (sin cargador). Al mismo tiempo son menos aparatosos que el que tengo. Los vaio y los samsung (especialmente éstos) son mucho más finos pero en cuanto al peso creo que andan por el estilo -debido a la pantalla que es más grande que el de 15” que tengo ahora-. Los dell eran más ligeros y más finos que el acer de ahora, pero tampoco demasiado.
• En cuanto al ruido, no tengo NI IDEA de si un samsung o un vaio hacen ruido o no, y si lo hacen en cuántos decibelios se traduce… los macs poco por no decir ningún ruido hacen (a menos que el disco duro esté pesadito, como el powerbook del trabajo), ¡aquí ganan un montón de puntos conmigo!, y los dell en general son bastante silenciosos, digamos que como los macs a grandes rasgos.
• Luego están los extras. Algo que me mola un montón de los macs es el diseño (¿y a quién no?)… son bonitos y cómodos de usar… y eso quieras que no se agradece… y la feature de teclado autoiluminado… me tienta, me tienta… De diseño, sólo el de samsung me llamaba algo la atención (en general samsung hace diseños que me llaman la atención), los dell y vaio son un poco más de lo mismo. Y el mac haría juego con mi iPod mini…
  Por otra parte hay gente que me ha dicho que, si bien mac aprovecha la aceleración gráfica de forma nativa para mover el entorno de ventanas (no como otros sistemas operativos, ejem…), lo que acaba pasando es que se come los recursos con todos los efectos y pitos y flautas que lleva. Otra gente me ha dicho que va de perlas. Están todos locos, o me quieren marear a mí. Yo lo que quiero es hacer mis inventillos en opengl, y si puedo navegar por el entorno gráfico sin tener que rezar para que las ventanas se muevan (como me pasa en windows muchas veces), mejor que mejor para mis nervios. Por otro lado y hablando de entornos gráficos, una vez te haces al de mac tiene mucha más lógica (es más usable que el de windows, y ni que decir tiene que más usable que el de linux).
  Dicen que flash en mac es una asquerosa basura, que va lento y blabla. ¿Alguien podría hacer el favor de medir cuántos frames por segundo se obtienen, o será que es sólo una leyenda urbana que afecta su percepción sensorial? Por otro lado también dicen que photoshop es una delicia en mac.
  En cuanto al sistema operativo y aún sin haber hecho ninguna prueba concreta apuesto 10 contra 1 (eso de apostar, que está muy de moda en uk jeje) a que mac OsX va 10 veces mejor que windows en muchos aspectos. La diferencia de arquitecturas ya se ha de notar ya… (que se note también que me las estudié cuando dí Diseño de Procesadores)
• Y finalmente vienen las pelas, los euros o las libras, da igual, el dinero. ¿Voy a aprovechar un mac? ¿Se me quedará anticuado? ¿No sería mejor que las pelas de un mac me las gaste en un pc megacañero? Aunque claro, realmente tampoco me pillaría el mac de gama más alta. No quiero una resolución de pantalla tan exagerada, y quiero que siga siendo una cosa portable- el powerbook de 17” es superior a mi capacidad de transporte. Y el teclado retroiluminado creo que sólo está en el powerbook de 15”. En cuanto a la configuración base, yo creo que es más que correcta, para almacenar música y datos te compras un disco duro externo y no te hace falta comprarte un megadiscoduro made in apple que te cuesta lo que medio ordenador (lo mismo con la memoria, como han apuntado por varios sitios: no te la compras en apple sino en otro sitio, y sirve igual). Así que… ¿qué haríais?

PD Tengo miedo, no quiero dar el paso a Mac porque no me quiero convertir en una loca fanática de apple, no quiero hacerles propaganda, quiero seguir poder argumentando las cosas sin repetir como un tantra la palabra mac mac mac mac… que alguien me dé sugerencias y/o opiniones fundadas, ¡por dios!