Category: software

Doom 3 for $30

Ashley BischoffLeave a comment

Via Joystiq, I discovered that GoGamer is offering Doom 3 for $30 as part of a 48-Hour Madness Sale. That sounded like a good price, especially since most other stores are selling it for $60 or so. But, before ordering, I first checked ResllerRatings to see whether it was worth buying from them.

As it turns out, GoGamer has a 6-month rating of 7.50/10 along with a “Gold” Elite Customer Excellence Award. That was good enough for me, so I placed an order. And, shipping was only $5.99 for FedEx 2-Day (bringing the total to about $36). If you’re thinking about ordering one for yourself, just keep in mind that there are about 12 hours left in the sale (as I write this).

Loading Acrobat Reader Faster

Ashley Bischoff2 Comments

OS X users are fortunate enough to have Preview for browsing PDFs, but Windows users still have to rely on Acrobat Reader. And, by many accounts, the latest version of Acrobat Reader wasn’t much improvement on the last one. In particular, it tends to load much more slowly.

In an effort to reverse that trend, Darrell Norton figured out that much of the slow-down is due to all the plug-ins that Acrobat Reader loads at startup. And he discovered that by moving a few files around, Acrobat Reader loads faster since it only load the plug-ins when it needs them:

  1. Go to C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 6.0\Reader (replace C if you installed on another drive, like D or E).
  2. Move all files [and subdirectories] from the “plug_ins” folder to the “Optional” folder.
  3. You’re done.

You can always leave a few plugins in the “plug_ins” folder if you still want them to load at startup (maybe you use search often, for instance). In any case, I tried this on my box and Acrobat Reader does seem to load a little more quickly. And I’m guessing that speedups may be even more noticable on other systems — with 768 MB RAM in this box, just about all my apps are cached after I load them the first time.

Tabbed Editors for OS X?

Ashley Bischoff28 Comments

Though I’m thoroughly enjoying my PowerBook, I’m not yet as productive on it as on my Windows box. It’s just a few niggling apps for which I haven’t yet found equivalents. And, at the top of the list is an editor.

I don’t need much in an editor — one with a tabbed interface along with syntax highlighting for HTML/CSS would be fine. Multiple undo/redo would be even better. But, I can’t find such an editor for OS X. Sure, on Windows, there would be several from which to choose — TextPad is probably the benchmark editor in this category and Crimson Editor (what I use) is freeware but just as good.

I’ve used tabbed editors on Windows for years and I’ve found them very handy. I often have four or five documents open at once — a couple CSS files, perhaps a JavaScript file or two, and a few HTML documents — and having a separate window for each document just feels clumsy to me. They invariably overlap and the filenames in their titlebars end up underneath each other. With tabs, I can see each filename easily and switch between files quickly.

When I first started looking for software for my PowerBook (before it even arrived, even), I penciled-in SubEthaEdit (formerly Hydra) as an interim editor. SubEthaEdit is a freeware editor with syntax highlighting and (as a bonus) Rendezvous support. But, it still didn’t have tabs for multiple documents.

Since finding SubEthaEdit, I’ve searched for other suitable editors, but I couldn’t find even one freeware editor with a tabbed interface. So, for a lack of other options, I figured that I may need to consider shareware/commercial editors as well. In that vein, I went to VersionTracker to peruse their HTML Tools section. I checked every app — shareware or otherwise — I couldn’t find even one with a tabbed interface :-/.

Some may claim that tabs are against Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines, but even Safari supports tabs (however, Apple does frown upon MDI interfaces). So, are tabbed interfaces a new thing to the Mac world or is there some mystical tabbed-editor that’s just been eluding me?

Distributed Spammer Annoyance App

Ashley Bischoff3 Comments

Adam Keeney wanted to annoy spammers and he figured that he could do so by filling out the forms on their websites with junk data. He soon realized that, if it was just him, the spammers would notice and then just block his ip address. So, he wrote Unsolicited Commando, a distributed Java app to automatcally fill out the forms:

Unsolicited Commando is specifically designed to fight spams that advertise sites that are trying to gather information about you. These often include sites that offer to refinance/eliminate your debt or sign you up with some sort of get rich quick scheme. These UCEs are rather lucrative, generating about $20 per valid lead from loan companies. If the good data is burried under the mounds of believeable BS that Unsolicited Commando provides then the mass-mailer must work harder to validate the data by placing thousands of phone call to false numbers. If the data is sold without verification then the mass-mailer’s reputation is ruined. Either way, Unsolicited Commando generates casualties. […]

This way, the spammers get junk data from a wide range of ip addresses and there’s no easy way to filter it. Of course, the more people participate, the more diverse the ip pool and the the more junk they get. I’m tempted to try this one ;).

Camino — Almost Had It

Ashley Bischoff3 Comments

When computing, I like a consistent user interface. When on Windows, I want Windows-widgets and when on Mac I want Mac-widgets :). And, for the most part, I haven’t had problems of that nature. But, Mozilla Firebird on Mac OS has always bugged me a little bit. It’s a great browser, of course, but it has its own widget set. For example, select pulldowns (as you might find for a State on a form) have a pull-down arrow and scrollbars — just as you’d find on Windows.

So, at a New Years get-together last night, Ru whipped out his 12" PowerBook to show us one of his favorite Flash movies (Cow Bondage, FWIW) and I noticed that his browser had all the native Mac widgets! After a quick glance to the menubar, I noticed that he was running Camino. I had heard of Camino before — a browser with the Gecko rendering engine along with a Mac-tastic interface — but I had assumed that development dwindled once Firebird came about.

As it turns out, the Camino project is alive and well. So, I downloaded the latest Camino nightly and gave it a try just now. I loaded it up and it was like putting on an old pair of shoes that fit in all the right places. I had all my familiar widgets and I was ready to make the browser transition from Firebird. But, trouble soon began to seep in…

I first checked the Windows menu for the DOM Inspector but I couldn’t find it. Not that regular web surfers have much need for such a tool, but I find it an indespensible resource for web development. So, I can perhaps understand why the Camino team omitted it from their project, but I was still a bit bummed about that.

I checked for tabbed-browsing and, sure enough, it has there (Apple-T opened a new tab, just like Firebird). And, all the familiar keyboard shortcuts worked as well (such as Apple-L to load the URL bar). But, Camino didn’t react to the right mouse button as I expected. I right-cliked on the Back button and only got a context menu for configuring the toolbar (not a list of sites that I could go back to).

I really wanted to like Camino, but it just didn’t feel right to me. Sure, maybe I could find some work-around to the Back-button right-click bit, but there’d still be the DOM Inspector issue. And, now that Firebird has DOM Inspector built-in, there’s not much of an incentive for anyone to create a DOM Inspector browser extension either.

My best bet may be a matter of getting native widgets into Firebird instead of trying to get all of Firebird’s functionality into Camino :-/. But, I don’t have my hopes up about that either; a quick search of Bugzilla for “widget” bugs on Mac OS didn't come up with anything useful. Perhaps there’re no plans to make use of native Mac widgets on Firebird — maybe the Firebird developers perceive that Camino has filled that role.