An Experiment in Bloggery

I picked up an iPhone on friday and I’ll try and remember to write up my thoughts later, but for now I have a quick tip.

For those of you who are like me and listen to full albums and lament the lack of a Compilations preference for the iPhone, learn to love the CoverFlow view. Since this view is album-centric it handles compilations properly. The only real flaw with this view is it’s ugly if you don’t have album art.

Am I alone in thinking that Safari should be able to show web pages for upcoming iCal events in its bookmarks pane, just like it does for Address Book and Bonjour? The way it works right now it’s quite annoying to open up an event web page because I have to launch iCal first.

I’m not going to write a long entry about it, but I am the proud owner of a brand new Wii. Suffice to say, it’s very fun, especially the Tennis game in Wii Sports.

I ended up camping out at Best Buy starting at 6PM on saturday. If I wanted I probably could have shown up around 4 AM or so and still gotten a unit, but I figured if I was going to camp, I’d do it right. I hung out with a group of guys from WPI (guys I hadn’t met before), and it was a lot of fun. Unfortunately, it was also freezing cold. From about 2AM to 5AM everybody was huddled under blankets trying to stay warm. Some people actually managed to sleep, but I didn’t. Still, I think it was worth it.

Note: Mac OS X 10.4.9 seems to fix the bug described here.

pmTool, the process run by Activity Monitor to actually collect stats, appears to leak memory. If I leave Activity Monitor running for a good period of time, when I check up on it pmTool is often using over 100MiB of Real Memory.

I just checked my laptop, pmTool was using over 100MiB of Real Memory. Right now on my desktop it’s using 41MiB of Real Memory, but I don’t remember how long it’s been running for. I also believe a good deal of memory is currently paged out.

After checking up on it, pmTool on my desktop has a Private Memory size of 91MiB.

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Recently I purchased Ninja Gaiden Black, on the advice of a friend. I had heard of this game before, described as ridiculously hard, but also supposed to be pretty fun. Well, what I had heard was wrong. It’s not ridiculously hard, it’s impossibly hard (and the fact that it’s Ninja Gaiden Black and not plain old Ninja Gaiden doesn’t help). And it’s not pretty fun, it’s ridiculously fun. I played it for about an hour after I bought it, but when the boss of the second level (the first being training) kept whipping my butt with incredible ease I put it down. Two days ago my friend started playing it, and yesterday he finally managed to beat the boss (after spending a lot of time trying). So, knowing it’s actually possible, I picked it back up again today and not only beat the boss, but spent probably about 4 or 5 more hours playing it and beating the next 3 levels. I only put it down because my roommate wanted to watch TV.

Not only is that game a lot of fun, it’s also a really visually appealing game (surprisingly beautiful for an Xbox game - I can only wonder at how it would look if it took advantage of the Xbox 360). All the moves look great, all the attacks have a lot of style and flair, and Ryu (the main character) is an incredible badass.

Usually when games are really hard and I can’t seem to progress past a certain point, I get discouraged. But ever since my success with that first boss, the seeming impasses in this game only drive me to try harder. There are points in this game where you have to do the same segment of the level over and over, and over, and over, ad infinitum. Again, such repetition would normally discourage me, but instead I use it as the chance to practice and hone my fighting skills until I can breeze past the previously-impossible segments with nary a scratch.

If you have never tried Ninja Gaiden, and you have a chance to (say, you or a friend own an Xbox), you owe it to yourself to purchase Ninja Gaiden Black and give it a try.

eddienull on #macdev posted a great link to a video of George Bush singing Sunday Bloody Sunday. I thought it was pretty great.

The DS Lite was released today, and I picked up my pre-order. I have yet to actually play with it yet (had to wait for it to charge), but it’s finally ready. I took some pictures of it first, though.

This morning, Tom Cruise flew over (in his private WWII bomber plane) and came on to Yahoo! Campus to give a talk as part of Yahoo!’s Inspirational Speakers program. And let me tell you, it was pretty darn cool. Turns out Tom is a really nice guy, and pretty funny too. Tom and Terry (CEO of Yahoo) talked about Tom’s movie career, and had a few amusing anecdotes about Tom and Terry. Quite enjoyable.

After the event I managed to get a few pictures of Tom with my cameraphone. Click on the picture below to view the set.

Tristan and I went to see V for Vendetta with a couple friends tonight. And I was completely blown away. I was told the movie was great, but it exceeded all of my expectations. I went into it knowing absolutely nothing about the plot, and I liked it that way so I won’t say anything here about it. To put it simply, you should watch this movie.

Last night I tried searching MacUpdate for bittorrent or Azureus and got zero results. I thought that to be very strange, and wondered if Joel decided to take an anti-piracy stance (despite the fact that BitTorrent is very useful for distribution of perfectly legal materials). But today when I looked again, I got all the results I expected. Very strange.