A 1.25GHz G4 PowerBook plays World of Warcraft far better than a 2.0GHz Intel Core Duo Macbook, even with 2GB of RAM, even with the video settings set lower on the MacBook. Civ IV, on the other hand, runs fine, something that’s not true on the G4. There’s got to be a bug in the video drivers, because that just doesn’t make sense, even with shared video memory.

[and why did I buy a MacBook instead of a MacBook Pro? Partially because I already have gaming hardware at home (and, at least for now, a work-owned MacBook Pro with 2GB of RAM), partially because I wanted the slightly smaller form factor and increased battery life, partially because Sony launched the α100 with a 135mm f/1.8 Zeiss lens…]

[by the way, I replaced the stock drive with a 160GB Seagate from OWC. I never even booted off of the supplied 60GB drive; I just moved it into an external enclosure and copied everything over with SuperDuper!]

[Update: I expected the problem to be related to the variety of shapes and textures used for player-character armor and weapons, so that having more people around made the performance worse. Nope, it’s geometry. I can run through a crowd in Undercity at 15 f/s, but I can’t stare at a single complex building (such as Light’s Hope Chapel, with no players in sight) without the frame rate dropping to 4-5 f/s. The crowds of people around the bridge in Ironforge aren’t what slows the MacBook down to 2 f/s; it’s the buildings themselves. The game is perfectly playable away from architecture.]

[Update: Damn. I mean, damn. I just finished putting the latest Boot Camp beta on the MacBook, and tested WoW under Windows. The frame rate was 3-5 times higher, across the board. Exact same hardware, exact same game settings, ridiculously fast. So I turned the settings up, restarting every time to see when it would choke, and found myself riding past the bank in Ironforge at 10 f/s with every setting at maximum, on Saturday night at 9pm. I realize that a reliable OS can’t let random drivers get as chummy with the hardware as Windows does, but damn. “Dear Apple. Fix this. Love, J”.]

I was working from home yesterday, and connecting to the office via VPN. In the past, this hasn’t been a big deal. This time, just as I was getting set up to start Something Important, the connection went down. Deliberately.

Secure VPN Connection terminated by Peer.
Reason 430: Configured Maximum Connection Time Exceeded.

Connection terminated on Sep 28, 2006 18:28:40   Duration: 0 day(s), 08:00.12

Good thing they bought a new VPN server to replace this one. Oh, wait; the new one’s still in beta, has been for months, and recently stopped working. Feh.

It’s hard to write a tribute to someone you never met, but if you shoot, you should know his name, and find the world a slightly smaller, duller place without him. Local news report here.

From reviews and pictures, I’ve become interested in the recent anime series whose title translates fairly well as The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. Recently, I’ve seen some comments from fans lamenting the fact that it hasn’t been licensed yet, despite its obvious popularity. Indeed, when I was in the Seattle Kinokuniya recently, there was a display table covered with Haruhi novels and tie-ins.

While watching a few good AMVs, I realized they’ve got a serious problem, and it may not be possible to license the series in the US in its present form. Why not? Because Playboy’s lawyers have no sense of humor.

That’s not just any bunny-girl costume, it’s the Playboy Bunny costume, and it’s covered by a registered trademark in the US. I looked it up, and Playboy still has active marks covering the bow-tie bunny girl; they’ve never stopped using it for promotions, and with their recent activity in Vegas, it’s becoming more visible again. And, yes, they care about things as minor as short animations produced for a con, and one of the US Dirty Pair comics was retouched to put Kei and Yuri into generic cocktail-waitress outfits.

September is ending, school is starting, my job is alternately tedious and annoying, and the world is filled with people desperate to pretend that everything will turn out all right if we just stop offending the delicate sensibilities of murderous savages.

And so, I spend my afternoon ogling pretty girls from Japan, modeling new bikinis and hawking gaming gear.

And if that doesn’t work, there’s always Ayaka teaching English to Morning Musume.

Why doesn’t anyone ever tell me these things?

First, I learn from Daring Fireball that holding down the Shift key turns your Mac mouse’s vertical scroll-wheel into a horizontal scroll wheel.

Then, just now, I accidentally hit my scroll-wheel while watching a video in QuickTime Player, and it scrubbed through the video. Remarkably useful.

I cherish these people. From the wipe manpage:

I hereby speculate that harddisks can use the spare remapping area to secretly make copies of your data. Rising totalitarianism makes this almost a certitude. It is quite straightforward to implement some simple filtering schemes that would copy potentially interesting data. Better, a harddisk can probably detect that a given file is being wiped, and silently make a copy of it, while wiping the original as instructed.

Recovering such data is probably easily done with secret IDE/SCSI commands.

My guess is that there are agreements between harddisk manufacturers and government agencies. Well-funded mafia hackers should then be able to find those secret commands too.

Don't trust your harddisk. Encrypt all your data.

After the violent death of my not-so-very-old fridge, I found several things to like about the new one.

First, it showed up an hour early.

Second, it has a button labeled Rapid Cool, which does exactly what it sounds like. The intended use is for when you’ve had the door open for a while, or you’ve just put something large and warm inside (like a big pot of leftovers), but I saw no reason not to push it as soon as it was installed, and about an hour later it was cold enough to stock with food.

Third, it has a button labeled Quick Cubes, which also does exactly what it sounds like. It adjusts the freezer compartment to optimize for making ice cubes, which is perfect for breaking in a new fridge, where you want to throw the first batch of cubes away.

Fourth, the french doors reclaim about a foot of clearance in my kitchen, making it slightly more practical to have two people trying to cook at the same time. The bottom freezer comes out quite a ways, but you don’t open that as often in the middle of cooking.

Fifth, it has an extra door seal between the french doors, and an audible alarm if the doors stay open for too long. Fridges that don’t always close reliably can ruin a lot of food. Not as thoroughly as ones that break down while you’re out of town for a week, but close.

Sixth, it has a full-width, full-depth, pull-out meat drawer. Actually, I should probably have listed that first…

It looks like you can’t link directly to product pages at Sears’ web site, but if you click on appliances and then type 76602 into the search box, you’ll see what I bought.