Because, I’ve got a tad bit of a confession to make. About my HacBook… yeah, I’m calling it a Gateway again. As it turns out, the OSX86 scene isn’t really developed enough to make my gateway a good hacbook pro. It kept overheating, the device support was spotty (especially bluetooth and ACPI) and it was gutting my battery life.

Since I’m a fan of computers I can actually use, I have decided to dust off my actually legit copy of Windows Home Premium, suck it up, and run Vista for a while.

If you’re a patron of my crazy ass rants about the majesty of desktop operating systems, you’d know that I will never use Windows XP, ever again. And, since my little Gateway NX260X will run Windows Vista just as well as anything else, and not to mention the fact that I’m a sucker for eye candy – even when its second rate – I’ve decided to abandon my Leopard build and go with Vista on my primary partition.

Net Gain? Windows Live Writer, better battery performance, and at least I can depend on my hardware. I’m not saying I won’t install Linux in its place tomorrow, especially since Microsoft products have an annoying tendency to ruin my life, but one of the main tenants of my whole Leopard strategy is that it just flippin works. Leopard on a Gateway is the opposite of my mantra. However, Vista on gateway? Oh yeah, it’s going to work. It might convince me to abandon my plans to use it as a workhorse for web design, but at least I can use it when I want to.

Actually, I’m probably going to download a couple of different builds from a few different circles and play around with Leopard on my spare drive. Especially since, when it works, it works like a mathafuckin champion. I just need something a little more polished than what Kalyway 10.5.2 and combo upgrades and a drive full of Kexts can provide today.

Anyways, stay tuned – There’s no way I’m done trying to turn this thing in to a Mac.

I was trying to figure out what to do about all these Microsoft browsers that destoy the prettiness of my theme. I’ve decided that i’d keep the astetic rolling in IE7 as it supports PNG transparency, but you folks who insist on using Internet Explorer 6 can just quit bitching and go home. I’m sick to death of people with Internet Explorer 6. It’s like, yeah - we get it - you don’t know how to use a computer. Get off the internet.

What I did was gut all the drop shadows, uglifiy the theme so at least it wouldn’t bother me in the future, and give you something I’m going to call Safe Mode. It’s like regular mode, except uglier and hastilly thrown together. I figure it’s only fitting, since I’m doing it for Microsoft user’s sake

So, I have, on my spare 80 gig drive, a running copy of Windows 7 Build 6801. This is a post PDC 08 build that still doesn’t have all the pretties Microsoft’s internal build’s got. It looks a lot like Windows Vista, except for a few slight differences that make this a right decent little beta build, as far as Microsoft OS’s go.

The first thing you’ll notice is that, unlike the M3 builds Microsoft were boasting about with the conspicuous dock-like Task bar replacement that we’re suppose to believe wasn’t copped from OSX, we’ve got something that looks an awful lot like Windows Vista’s Taskbar. It’s OK, though - there’s a few new features that are worth noting.

If you’ll look to the left of the system clock beside the tray, you’ll see a small glass panel. If you click this, it clears to your desktop. If you right click on it, it’ll give you a context menu that offers you the abbility to ’show desktop’ or ‘preview desktop’. As of this build, they are exactly the same thing. I assume, however, that when finished, the preview desktop feature will remove the window elements from the glass windows decorators so you can see your desktop while keeping perspective of the windows you have in play.

I don’t, for the life of me, understand this feature. You can sort of see what Microsoft’s going for with the new Windows Management feature, which I shall call draggable hotsides.  I don’t know what Microsoft’s calling it, so I shall name it here.

Basically, and let me see if I can’t get a screen shot of this, when you are dragging a window, if you drag the window to the top of the screen, where your cursor actually touches the screen edge, a glassified outline of the window will fill the screen. when you drop the window, it will maximize. If you drag the window to the left or the right, the outline will take up only half the screen, pinned to whichever side you drug it to. In this way, you can easily tile vertically two windows so that you may compare them. Dragging the window to the bottom does nothing, and you can restore a maximized window with this method as well.

It’s kinda obvious what Micosoft’s looking to achive here. Between Compiz (Linux) and Quartz (OSX), Aero just doesn’t offer the world anything new. With 7, they are trying to play catch-up and offer us a few ‘Windows Exclusive’ features that people will use. I haven’t seen anything do the split window hot-sides, however Compiz can do the maximize-restore effect, and then some.

Between this, the Live Thumbnail features that are also not in this build, and the pre-existing Flip 3D stuff they had in Vista, I think Microsoft looks at this as a slam dunk. Sorry, Microsoft. You’re wrong. You want to sell me a copy of Windows 7? Add Expose. Call it whatever you want, pretend you did it first, I don’t care. Just add the fucking thing. Expose is the single most useful feature in this history of Graphical User Interfaces. Windows is the only OS I can’t do it in. I know, there’s 3rd party apps that do a terrible emulation of it, but I want something native and fast. It would go a long way in making a de-switcher out of me.

The system tray has gotten a nice little re-vamp as well. Instead of hiding the system tray icons, and showing them with a spread-out button, they have a pop-up windowette that contains all the hidden system tray icons. I imagine this will be far better when they implement the WinDock.

The Start Menu has also recieved a few nice touch-ups. Start menu searches now take up the entire start pane, the transparency effects are now more glass-like, which looks a lot better. Oh yeah, maximizing windows doesn’t remove the transparency effects like it does in Windows Vista. I hated that, it made the OS seem plastic and cheap. At least now, I’ve got more pretty glass on the screen then I ever even really cared to.

Which, brings me to my next point. Has anyone noticed that Glass really isn’t all that pretty? It looks good with specific desktop backgrounds if you tweak it, but overall I actually prefer the opaque nature of my Windows in Leopard. That goes for Windows Vista as well. I’m sure they’ll rape the Visual Style by RC1, so maybe they’ll get a lot of my nagging problems taken care of.

That’s all for now. They’ve finally added some of the apps they were promising with Longhorn, and some of our old favorites have recieved a much-needed revamp. More in part two.

You know I’m a Mac Guy at heart, right? So, when I tell you that I’ve got to download, install it, and figure out how Microsoft’s going to knock it out of the park with this whole Windows Vienna thing, don’t be confused. I fully expect Microsoft to ruin this, but it’s not going to stop me from oogling the new pretties all over this blog.

So, let’s discuss for a minute what Microsoft needs to with Windows 7. I’ve read a few articles about it, however I don’t hold them as gospel. The truth is, Redmond is filled to the brim with bumbling idiots. I believe, however, that with the kind of money Balmer’s undoubtedly dumping in to this product, somebody might just surface that can keep the Windows Team on track. So, let’s assume for a moment that Microsoft hussles up a Steve Jobs like character, let’s assume that with this release, Microsoft finally gets it’s shit together.

Microsoft needs to make Windows smaller. They don’t need to do it with the scalpel, either. They need to take a butchers knife to the bloody thing. They need to get rid of all legacy code, they need to clean up the codebase and chop support for every application that’s not designed by the latest developer tools.

‘But Doug - This will mean that I won’t be able to run Word Star for Windows or some other rediculiously obscure application that I cling to because I’m afraid of modern software’ - Too bad. Install Parallels. Your idiotic need to run software that no one in their right mind would still use has been holding Windows Back for a decade now. It’s time that Microsoft breaks backwards compatibility and builds a better mouse trap.

Surely, you must be saying to yourself, they need to do more than break backwards compatibility. You’re right. They need to radically redesign their operating system. From the ground up. I would say they should pull an Apple and use UNIX as the codebase, but Microsoft has a vested interest in developing their own in-house tools. Besides, MinWin probably isn’t too bad. It was a good idea; compartimentalize the the Operating System, make the kernel small and flexable. Make the User Experience built on top of that kernel as small and flexable as they can. Compartimentalize the OS, take a good hard look at their competition, and steal every single one of their ideas with merrit.

I think the conventional wisdom about a total revamp of the OS, and why many of the more astute technical pundits think Microsoft’s going in a different direction (Vista Version 2), is that this will only serve to anger the people even more than they already are. They’ll run in to migration problems and head-aches and might then switch over to the competition.

I happen to think that it’s exactly what Microsoft Needs to prevent people from switching to the competition. Microsoft needs their next operating system to outclass OSX. It needs to be brilliantly designed, it needs to position itself so that it can finally stop playing catch-up and start innovating. Most importantly, Microsoft needs to stand up and start boldy controlling the direction computer makers head with its software. It needs to challenge them to build better products, it needs to enable OEMs to build these products with a new generation of cleanly designed, functional tools and software from Microsoft, and it desperately needs to make an ecosystem of competition between five or six fierce companies trying to find the magic formula that knocks Apple down a few pegs.

It’s plainly obvious to me that if Microsoft’s game plan is just a code clean up of Windows Vista, developers are going to start taking matters in to their own hands. It’s already getting to the point where the power users are jumping ship. After a while, developers are going to want to start doing things that your OEM copy of Windows won’t be able to do. Drivers will be slow and cumbersome, system speed will degrade to the point where nothing good can be ran on it… The era of monolithic kernels should be coming to it’s end.

With Virtualization and an incredibly fast x64 platform provided by every major player in the processor market, Microsoft has an opportunity to start the glacieral process of changing the public perception of the software it designs. Instead of doing it with clever ads and superficial changes, like they did with Windows Vista, they need to change public perception by stepping up to the plate and releasing a solid product.

Here’s to hoping. I doubt Microsoft has it in them; but I hope they do. Trust me, nothing would make me happier than finding an operating system that’s better than Leopard. I’m always looking for the next big thing. But, somehow, I expect ‘7′ will be the final nail in the Windows coffin. I figure, five or ten years from now, Microsoft will only be able to sell a copy of WIndows when somebody wants to run it in a virtual enviroment.

Yeah, so you know that post I just wrote about why Leopard’s better than Vista?

Keychain is the password manager for the Mac. I have passwords on everything  I do: Websites, Changing Settings, accessing my files, all of which I want to keep private, all of which I loathe typing passwords for. Instead of how Windows handles this very important task, which is to say barely at all, Mac’s store all of your password in an encrypted system in a part of an adanced UNIX operating system that’s far to scrutinized and well designed for a bunch of idiots with Visual Basic to exploit. And, based on how you want it to roll, will make your life online far easier… or more secure. Whatever, that’s what keychain does.

I had a need to enter Keychain just now. Lowenbehol, the little bastards all in Japanesse. Since I don’t read japaneese, nor really understand what exactly happened right there, I’m kinda stumped as to what to do. What caused it? I bootlegged OSX and it’s running on a Gateway, that’s what. Nevertheless, I still need to get in to Keychain.

What to do? I’ll tell you. Launch Finder, and connect to Kid’s MacBook. You click Connect As and login with his user account. Then, you double click the icon that says Macintosh HD. Then, you  click on the icon that says Applications. Then, you click the icon that says Utilities. Then, you drag the icon that says Keychain Access on to your desktop. Then, you click on the new icon that says Keychain Access.

As it turns out, his Keychain Access program will work on my computer without a problem.  That’s my point. It’s better designed. I’ll tell you what, watch what happens the next time one of your windows application gimps out for some reason. What I managed to presicely describe in detail in a short paragraph will involve backing up all of your data and three hours of work on Windows Vista.

I just wanted to point that out. Thank you for your patronage.

You know, I kinda feel bad about the last post I wrote regarding my laptop. With all the discussions of problems I’m having, casual readers might reckon that I’m having a negative experience with OSX on my PC. Quite the contrary, I can assure you. As a matter of fact, this experience - if anything - has solidified my firmly held belief that OSX is the best damn operating system, period. All the problems I’m having aside, I’m very impressed by OSX; It’s obvious to me that Microsoft or our friends The Open Source Community got nuthin’ on Leopard.

I don’t want to discuss technical merit. Obviously, Windows has it’s uses where OSX simply wouldn’t fit. I.E. anywhere you already have a non-apple computer and want to put an OS on it. Anyone who wants to win that discussion can simply point at my laptop and laugh. I want to discuss design philosophy, I want to discuss User Experience, and most importantly - I want to discuss work flow. Not the scripting app, the concept involving starting from point A, and ariving at point B. Getting things done, if you will.

I love the Macintosh Desktop. Leopard still has a few mountains to climb before I call it Computing Utopia, but it’s lapped Vista six or seven times already. The proof is in the pudding, I reckon. Just look at Vista.

(Another long post, after the jump)

I wanted to be fair, so I posted an old screenshot of my old Desktop running Vista. You know, because you don’t have to use a shitty looking Desktop for Windows Vista to lose this fight. Let’s go right down the list. Windows Sidebar is gay, it’s buggy and slow, it’s a half-hearted rip-off of the much better Dashboard (In all respects, I like how Dashboard has it’s own layer of my desktop, I like how installing a dashboard widget is far easier than installing a Gadget on Vista, I like the default widgets 10x better, and the fact that a Dashboard Widget isn’t constrained by such a small size makes them far more useful. The sidebar’s for show, The Dashboard is useful for work. I use The Dashboard for all sorts of things.

Also, Glass is gay. I know, look at Windows Explorer, it’s pretty. Now, look at the IM Window in the screenshot. It wasn’t pretty in XP, it’s downright ugly in Vista. As it turns out, Glass is really only a window border decorator. If you want your app to look good with glass, you’ve got to spend a week getting the form to paint the glass, then you’ve got to spend even more time making the app useful because Glass isn’t exactly designed to be useful as far as developing applications that fully support it go. Even Microsoft reccommends using Glass sparingly. Want more beef? Maximize that window, and the toolbar becomes a doofy mix of white and black designed to look like what glass would look life if both light shined through it, but the glass was totally opaque. Steve Jobs is right, Microsoft has terrible taste, and Vista’s UI niceties really drive the point home.

On the Mac? It’s practically pristine. The Dock is just an array of Icons that you can easily interpret at a glance, shifting between windows is a flick of the wrist with Expose set to a hot corner, and the menu bar really cleans up every window on the screen. I could see the merits of an argument that Windows Explorer is a more robust File Manager than Finder, but it doesn’t have Cover Flow or Quick Look, so I’ll stick with The Finder. Quick Look - the ‘open a file and look at it really quickly instead of launching some app’ answer to my ‘god damnit, which file is it’ prayers. It’s like that. Everything that takes six steps in Vista can be done in one on a Mac.

Let’s see - Stacks is like 50 times better than a Quick Launch menu on the Start Menu… I could go on, but I think you can see my point.

So, I have this computer that I want to do something on. Let’s take my blog - no matter the OS i’m using, I’ll be able to work on my blog. I can use a set of tools in Windows (FileZilla, Araneae, Photoshop, WLW) or I can use a set on my Mac (Cyberduck, Smultron, Photoshop, ImageWell and my Admin Panel). I really don’t want to get in to the specifics about exactly why each app is better - if you’ve used them it would be obvious to you. Editing a PHP file on the server? I’d rather do it on the Mac. Open the file with cyberduck, every time I save the text file it’s uploaded back to the server. Refresh the page and I can see what’s different. Since it literally takes the time of exposing to the Window and clicking the refresh button to post the new file, it works incredibly well. On Windows, you’ve got to save the file, go to Filezilla and click ‘upload’, then go to your browser.

You see the problem? Extra Step there. However hard I’ve tried, I could never get it as simple as it is by default on the Mac. There was always some gotcha you had to deal with, some bullshit that wouldn’t just work right. Perhaps the FTP session closed in CuteFTP and I had to reconnect, then the file wouldn’t save right… and I’d have to re-open the file, and cut the contents of the old temp file in to the new one… bullshit like that. It’s like Windows Applications work against you. OSX just doesn’t have these problems. You can focus on what you’re working on, it works without breaking down and annoying you. The OS gets out of the way of what you’re trying to do - Windows tries to govern what your doing.

Sure, I can’t find a decent Blogging Client for the Mac, and I could by every right install WLW in parallels and use it on my Mac without any problems at all, but - as it turns out - I’m just as attached to ImageWell as I was to WLW. And, since it takes source images and spits out URLS to my image just the way I like them, I find that my word press Admin Panel actually is a lot powerful than I originally gave it credit for. I’ve actually become quite attached to it.

ImageWell is a decent little case study in and of itself. It Appsonifies the Apple User Experience. The App does one thing, and does it better than anything else on the planet. When I got my HacBook right, I downloaded the newest version and realized that they recently turned the free version in to a seven day trial. So, what did I do? I deleted that motherfucker. Then, I logged in to my iMac over the network, went to my applications folder and grabbed the version of ImageWell I use on the iMac. Dragged from one Applications folder to the other one. I then right clicked my image Icon and launched ImageWell. Problem Solved. Now, my iMac is a PowerPC G5 and my HacBook’s an intel. I used xSlimmer to remove all the Intel specific bits from my apps to make them marginally quicker. So? Rosetta is totally transparent and quick enough that I can’t really notice the difference. If I didn’t take it upon myself to remove the Intel Bits, it would run naively because most every application written in the past few years will run naively on both the PPC and Intel platforms.
Could I do that in Vista? Hell no, not unless I was either incredibly lucky or felt like registry diving and tracking down and registering DLL files for two hours. Again, Windows gets in the way, Apple gets out of the way. They might have well call it Doors for all the help it gives you running your computer.

I don’t even feel like giving an additional sermon about how much better software for the Mac is designed when compared to software for Windows. Look at Adium and Pidgin for the proof. It’s made by the same group, uses the same core, has practically the same technical functionality, the only difference is that Adium is made for a Mac, and Pidgin for Windows (and linux - which is sort of the same thing in this instance). Pidgin shows it’s contact list in a dirty ass window. Adium liberates it by giving you the ability to attach it to a screen corner, remove the window border, make the background transparent and overall making IM as unintrusive as humanly possible.

I could go on, but I imagine I don’t need to. Just, the next time you’re curious as to what the differences between a Mac and a PC are, read this Post. Because, in my mind, these are the compelling reasons to use a Mac. The Applications are better, the OS runs better, it gives me way more features, and the features that both OS’s share were originally designed by Apple, and Apple’s already perfected the shit Windows Vista just introduced. “But Doug! I need to run Windows Applications!” - STFU and install Parallels. Parallels with Windows XP in Mac OSX is basically what Microsoft was trying to accomplish with Windows Longhorn. They couldn’t pull it off, so they scrapped it and released Vista instead.

So, if you’ve been keeping up, you’d know that I have a few unresolved issues with the ol’ HacBook. Other than the sleep/restart/shutdown issues, the system’s unstable when I try to use it like a big boy computer.

Although I’m a few months late (which, since I just started messing with the OSX86 two weeks ago, I think it’s OK), I finally decided to update to 10.5.5 and make sure I’ve got the latest kernel available. I figure it’s time for a status report.

My first attempt at installing the 10.5.5 Combo Update went awry when the system overheated during the installation. At least I figure it overheated, I was in the bathroom at the time. Hoping I didn’t hose my OS, I tried to reboot six different ways to no avail. I let out a louder-than-necessary ‘SON OF A BITCH!’ and removed my hard drive with the intent of formatting and starting over.

(This one gets kinda long, so more after the jump)

Oh, so that last sentence makes a little bit of sense - the SATA controller on my Gateway NX260X blows. Neither the Leopard Install DVD or Windows XP Installer will see it in boot-up. It became an issue with Windows XP due to my USB floppy drive going AWOL because I loaned it to my cousin; but that’s a whole other story. Needless to say, it’s kind of hard to install Leopard when the Install Disk doesn’t recognize your hard drive, so I’ve resorted to using some old Desktop my brother got rid of to perform the actual OS installation. So, when I need to reinstall OSX, I’ve got to physically remove the drive and pop it in to the desktop I keep under my TV.

Anyways, Instead of formatting the drive, I decided instead to just install over my previous Mac install, figuring if it worked I would at least be able to keep my Virtual Machine and all the files I’ve acquired. When the install finished, I threw the drive back in to the laptop and gave it a whirl. To my extreme delight, instead of the ‘Welcome’ OOBE I’ve become accustomed to, It simply prompted me for my password. I logged in, and there was my desktop, just as I had left it. Well, if I left it at a low resolution without it detecting any of my devices.

So, instead of going through the ‘post install’ steps I’ve developed to get the system right (I’ve installed leopard like a dozen times by now - the time I finally got it right, I decided to re-do it to make sure it wasn’t some fluke in the matrix and that I had everything I needed when the shit ever hit the fan), I decided to head straight for the 10.5.5 Combo Update posted by the zen master Mysticus C.

I don’t know exactly what’s changed in regards to my power management, but the laptop is running far cooler than it was under 10.5.2. Maybe the Installer installed an ACPI Kext that’s managed to get my rampant and unpredictable overheating under control, maybe the new 9.4.0 ModBin Kernel just handles processor resources better; I don’t know. However, I only know too well the placebo effect; the effect of thinking something is fixed because you want it to be fixed, not because it’s actually fixed. After a few unfortunate drop dead experiences with this thing, I’m kind of curious as to if it’s just gotten slightly better but still unstable, or if it’s actually running as its suppose to. So, i’ve spent most of the night stress testing it.

The First Stress Test I did was with SixtyForce. You see, after I got Quartz Extreme working in 10.5.2, one of the first things I did (after playing with the screen saver prefpane for like an hour) was play a little Mario 64; a game that I legally own and happen to have a rom of strictly for archival backup purposes.

As it turned out, by the time I was within diving range of my tenth star, it died on me. I found this kind of odd, since it doesn’t take all that much to run an N64 rom (if you have a 500MHz Pentium 3 and any kind of  3D Accelerator you’re  all set). So, naturally, I figured a good first step to seeing if the machine was stable was playing more Mario 64. I got up to about 17 Stars before I ultimately got bored and tried something else.

So, I decided to try a CPU Burn-In tool. So, I grabbed a copy of CPU Burn-In , which seems like it’s been around since I was a kid, and loaded it up in paralells. I gave it an hour, figuring if it can stand it for an hour it’s in all liklihood fine, and watched some TV on the iMac. About 15 minutes in, it died on me. No big deal, I figure. It’s sort of an unfair test. The tools designed to get desktop processors with two pound fans attached to massive heat syncs to melt down. The entire cooling system on this laptop is half the size of a pack of playing cards. Not a fair test.

So, I figure I’d give something else a shot… I’ve ran in to problems installing OS’ from Paralells from the optical drive. Stays cool when I do it from an ISO image, generates a shit ton of heat when I do it from the optical drive. So, I grab my Store Bought Windows Vista DVD and let it have at it. I thought I was in the clear, so much so that I started writing this article on the laptop about it’s success when it died on me on the last leg of the installation.

If you’ll notice in the menu bar, I’ve added Tempeture Monitor to my repeturare to keep track of the proccessor temp. It appears that normal operating tempature for this laptop is between 70-80 degrees celcus. Seems kind of high to me, according to some places I found on google, anything above 50 degrees is suicide, but that just doesn’t seem right to me.

The problem seems to come in to play when it gets in to the mid 90’s. Not just when it hits around 95, but when it hovers there for a few minutes. This makes sense, because 95 degrees is way to damn hot for a processor.

So, I’ve got some research to do. I think tommorow, I’m going to install Windows on a spare hard drive and run the same CPU Burn-in test I ran on the Mac and see how WIndows handles it. Try to narrow the problem down a little.
I still contend that it’s running a lot better now than before, but since I A) Don’t know why, or B) can really prove it, It seems that I should be able to at least reproduce these results in Windows if I want to settle with it on the Mac. It doesn’t make sense to use an unstable Mac OSX if I can use a stable Windows Vista.

It seems like, and I’m sure nobody’s going to bother reading this far in to this post, that the update - however it managed to do it - has been able to keep the system a good 5-10 degrees cooler; which might put it in line with Windows. Being that this is my father’s old laptop, I’m sure it’s done more processing in the past week than it’s done it’s entire life combined. So I figure if it’s a hardware issue - shit cooling fan, maybe needs some thermal greese, whatever, I might as well deal with it as a Mac. If not, then I need to do some serious work before I’ll be happy with using Leopard as my primary OS on this laptop.

More as it develops.

There, I summed up the McCain Campaign in a nutshell. George Bush has totally raped this country. John McCain voted for Bush’s Legistlation 90% of of the time. McCain wants to stay in Iraq well in to the next century. McCain wants to overturn Roe V Wade, and he wants to make sure that those dastardly faggots can’t offend jesus and get married. His running mate is militantly against any form of abortion, ane he believes in small goverment just so long as it helps the rich.

When you’re casting your vote this coming November, I don’t want you to think about any of these things. I want you to remember that Barak Obama pals around with terrorist, he might be an arab, and that McCain spent five years in a POW camp to absolve you of your sins. He’s also white. Need I say more?

On the scale of one to ten, my trekkiness score tops off in the mid thirties. I’m like a walking trek encyclopedia. I’ve seen every episode of every series at least fix or six times, some seasons (See: TNG & DS9) I’ve watched a dozen or more. My obsession with Star Trek is truly pathetic. Perhaps it stems from my tragic obsession with science and technology. Maybe it’s because Star Trek is the single greatest collection of stories in the history of man. I don’t know, I’m no scholar.

So, let me be frank here. Up until just a few minutes ago, my expectations of the new Star Trek movie were through the floor. I wish they’d stop trying to ruin the single greatest universe ever created.

It was recently told that this films villain is a pointed eared fellow named Nero. J.J. Abrams has yet to indicate on Nero’s race. We can infer he’s either Vulcan or Romulan by the points on those ears.

Since Abrams says that this movie would agree with established Trek Cannon, we can infer the following. Star Fleet knew virtually nothing about the Romulan Race until The Enterprise intercepted a Romulan War Bird destroying Federation Star Bases along the Romulan Neutral Zone (”Balance of Terror”, TOS 1×08). According to Spock, Humanity and the Romulans fought a war over a century prior, where the technology was so limited, that no Human had ever seen a Romulan. It wasn’t until Spock was able to tie in to the ships communications system did they learn that  Vulcans and Romulans shared a common ancestory.

Now, if we go back that century and consider ENT canon, we can safely say that this Nero isn’t an unrealistic interpretation of some of the Vulcans of that era who abandoned the teaching of Surak. The mood filled look on his face would certainly indicate that he doesn’t hold the IDIC, or the Teaching of Surak in high regard. The Tatoos on his face, for me, imply that he’s not a Romulan. Romulans, from all we know about them, are Nationalist; almost to the point of Facism. They are extemely Xenophobic.

The Vulcans, on the other hand, have a diverse culture and there were several instances of Vulcans leaving the homeworld and exploring other religious avenues that could more easily explain his strange tattoos.

This is Star Trek, so whomever the villain is, in all likilhood, is a goverment official who would like nothing more than to drag the battered hull of the Federation Star Ship to the homeworld as a trophy of the glorious defeat of the Federation.

As was made clear in Star Trek X (If you consider it a real Trek Movie) the Romulans don’t really care who you are, or what you look like, just so long as you can beat the bloody hell out of your foes. So, it’s hard to say. It’s just important to note that pissed off person with pointy ears doesn’t automatically make them romulan.

Kirk (played by Chris Pine) is in a Black Uniform, instead of the usual gold for command officers during the TOS era. According to Co-Producer Damon Lindelof, the Black uniform is significant to the story leading up tot his scene. I don’t know what to make of this. Surely, when thinking of Federation Officers in Black Uniforms, my mind quickly drums up Sloane from Section 31.

In Deep Space 9, Sloane was an operative of a rouge organization known as Section 31. It’s an officially non-existent and autonomous organization within Starfleet Intellegence. It’s the Federation equivilent to the Romulan Tal’Shar or the Cardassian Obsidean Order.

The goal of Section 31 was to deal with threats to the Federation in cases where the Federation wasn’t in a position to deal with them itself. One example is when Section 31 secretly made Odo a carrier of a virus that would hopefully infect the Founders in an attempt to destory the race. As the Federation were in the midst of a war with the Dominion, killing the Founders would topple the Dominion.

Of course, one important factor of being an operative of Section 31 is that no one is suppose to know you’re a member of Section 31. Hell, nobody’s even suppose to know of the existance of 31.

However, it’s been established that Section 31 dates back to the Federation Charter, and that the prospect of a story line where Kirk isn’t bounded by the Prime Directive would put a twist on the beaten-to-death righeous Star Fleet versus The Big Bad.

One could speculate that perhaps Kirk was commissioned by Section 31 to deal with said Big Bad, when dealing with them would be a clear violation of The Prime Directive. Perhaps the B-Story is Kirk’s struggle between his institutional beliefs of non-interference and the nessesity of protecting the Federation from this threat.

It would be a great story for McCoy, who historically was Kirk’s conscience. McCoy could disagree with the entire premise of Kirk’s plan, and would provide Kirk with a needed voice of reason as his good intentions lead him to hell. This would play off well with Spock, who’s perspective would most likely be the logic of not handing over the federation to the romulans… or the bad vulcans. Whatever. One of the main themes of Star Trek was that wherever Kirk led, Bones and Spock followed - rather they agreed with it or not. Even though they’d tell Kirk how they felt, it took a whole hell of a lot before they’d work against him.

One Last Question: What’s going on here? This doesn’t look like Romulus, and the light side of Remus is too warm for a winter wasteland. It could be the Breen Homeworld, however there’s conflicting accounts on rather or not it’s even cold there (The Breen wear refridgeration suits because their homeworld is so cold, however Weyun says that the Breen homeworld isn’t cold at all). This could indicate that it’s Andor or, at least one of it’s sister worlds, however it’s important to note that the galaxy is filled with cold worlds covered in ice. If it is Andor, this would agree with the Vulcan theory earlier in this post.

So, in conclusion, I have no idea about any of this. Your guess is as good as mine. It’s fun to speculate though. Who knows, maybe I’m right. All I’m saying is that Star Trek is awesome, and I can’t wait for this movie!

It’s nowhere close to perfect, but it’s certainly better than running Ubuntu or Windows. There seems to be a sort of overheating issue, which bothers me to no end. Check it; the fan works. It’s running right now. It even revs up when it gets hot. However it overheats anyways.

On the InsanelyMac forums, practically everyone with overheating problems say that their fans aren’t running at all. Or, their fans only start to run after a warm boot (basically, since OSX has no idea how to control the fan, it doesn’t. So, the system gets too hot and restarts. Then, the BIOS - which knows how to control the fan - realizes the computer is about to catch fire and cools the thing down). I’m not having this problem. If anything, I would figure that the Mac is trying to run my processor like it’s on a Desktop instead of on a Laptop, and it assumes that the cooling is adequate when it’s really not.

I’ve screwed with the performace settings in the Energy Saver preference pane, and it hasn’t actually died on me since, (which, to be fair, the only time it has was last night after atempting to install Windows XP in Paralells), however I gave it another shot and I thought it was going o melt right through the desk.

Other than that, I’ve got a few other non-clean things going on. My NIC isn’t working. Which, it would be nice if it was. It’s not crucial, though - and truth be told - I never use the bloody thing anyways.

I was able to get my hands on a Realtek PCIe-M card. Mac OSX doesn’t know what the hell it is, and I’ve got to use a connection manager ala Windows 2000  to connect to wireless. Which, on the hole is fine with me, but does the icon have to sit in the dock?

Let’s see… after several hours of playing I was able to get my battery icon in my Menu Bar. After another hour, I was finally able t get it to work. I can’t put the laptop to sleep, restarting the laptop turns it off, and shutting the laptop down causes a kernel panic.

I do, however, have a working touchpad with two finger scrolling. Which, if you’re me, is worth every bit of the hassle.

It’s plenty fast, though. Although Quartz Extreme is disabled, it has all the visual niceities that I’ve come to expect from the worlds best Operating System. Well, except for the translucent menu bar. But, seriously - who cares? Expose, Dashboard and all the transitions work. There is a slight bit of artifcating every once in a while when the compositing kicks in. I’ve only noticed it three or four times in the past few days. If you blink, you’d probably miss it.

The one other thing that its doing is with the Bluetooth. I can not get it to pair with my mouse. It’ll pair with my iMac, it’ll start to pair with both of my bluetooth mice (Logitech Travel Mouse and the Wireless Mighty Mouse) but the bluetooth utility will show an error stating that it’s the mouses fault that the pairing failed. When I start messing with it again, I’ll see if I can beam files between the computers. Something tells me that I can’t.