Alfreido's Blog

Hail the fucking lord, that’s all I have to say.

Seriously, I am really loving my MacBook Pro at the moment. If you need to know, I have the 2.4ghz Intel Core-Duo version, with a 256mb 8600m GT, and it is seriously a slick, speedy piece of hardware with few faults. The only faults I could pick up were the lack of a double-buttom touchpad to emulate the left and right clicks of a normal mouse. Seriously, Apple, well done your OS is simple enough to use with only one mouse button. But for those actually living in the 21st century, we prefer to have the 2-button salute to do all the things the left click doesn’t do. Holding ‘Control’ and using the click button doesn’t cut it. I also noticed the laptop does get quite hot, negating the ‘lap’ in laptop. But those are the only things I can think of.

Regarding Mac OS X, I’m finding it more and more to be my OS of choice. I just love the form factor of the OS itself, it definitely looks more sleek and sexy than Windows XP, and arguably Windows Vista. I was one of the few who liked the look of Windows Vista, even if it runs like a dog with his feet stapled to the floor. It is also very awesome that Mac programs are installed by these single .dmg files as opposed to the clusterfuck that is the Windows program installers. To its credit though, Windows has a lot more programs available to it, something I found quite daunting to begin with, but I have gradually found Mac counterparts.

Speaking of Windows, I do have it installed in Boot Camp, to satisfy my mobile gaming needs. I installed World in Conflict, and have actually found with some tweaking, I can play the game on 1440×900 (the default resolution of the Apple MacBook Pro 15″ screens) at a very playable frame rate, and it looks very mint. I have been playing LAN games with my brothers and have had some good sessions on it. I don’t know if Apple intended it but these laptops could easily become a good gaming laptop. They have a lot of untapped power under the hood.

Overall, it’s a very awesome laptop, I’m loving it immensly. Go and get yourself one if you can afford it.

I got a MacBook Pro Friday last week through work, and I must say, I’m sold on Mac OS X 10 being better than Windows in areas. Watch this space cos in 2 weeks I’ll give my overall impressions on the MacBook Pro when I’ve sufficiently used it enough to be classed as ‘used to it’.

I’ve got Windows XP installed using Boot Camp as well, so it’s not like I’m missing out on Windows

Yesterday, whilst searching for domains that I wanted to buy for a new project of mine (more details on that in the post below), I had a thought to see if I could buy ‘benthomson.com‘. Turns out it’s already bought, by another Ben Thomson. I had to go see what this alternative Ben Thomson was all about.

Apparently my alter-ego is a somewhat famous tuba player over in Britain, although it seems he is trialling for the Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra. He appears to also be 21 years of age, although, this could be wrong as I didn’t see any indication of when the page was updated. He also has a boofy haircut, much like how my hair used to be when I was in high school, although now my haircut is still just weird. He also wears glasses, which I used to wear (I don’t anymore since my eyes corrected themselves… well… sort of).

There’s just one thing wrong with this Ben Thomson: He designed his site using Microsoft Office Live.

Incidentally, Mr. Alter Thomson, if you wish to contact me, I would love to help a ‘brother-by-name’ out with going in the right direction, website wise.

Anyways, I’ll throw it out there to everyone else… what do your alter-egos get up to?

Just so you are all in the know, I have opened up a new blog called Grand Theft Alfreido, for all my rants about everything to do with gaming. All posts related to gaming will go in there now, keeping this blog for serious discussions, rants outside of the games industry and web development tidbits. So check it out when you have the chance!

I’m all for a good protest. Nothing beats the feeling of just exorcising all the demons and letting loose at a bigger (or sometimes smaller) entity and letting them know just how insignificant they are in the eyes of the mob. But I have to disagree with all these pro-Tibet protests on the eve of the Olympics.

Let me clarify my position before you pro-Tibet people throw me on a stake and purge me in the fire. From the limited knowledge I have of China’s treatment of Tibet, they deserve all the scorn they get, but this is the Olympics. Every 4 years, numerous countries and nations gather across the world, put aside their petty differences, and in a very rare display of unity in these times, participate for the better part of a week in a grand sporting event. This is the very fundamentals, and by damn the nearest we’ll ever get, to some sort of world peace. And yet, just because the host country is doing a deplorable act to another country doesn’t mean you should ruin the Olympics for the other countries, some of whom have stated their disappointment at China’s treatment of Tibet, but choose to celebrate the Olympic spirit.

The Olympic torch, widely regarded as the spirit of the Olympics, has been put out on more than one occasion by protesters who, ironically, want peace in Tibet. So, for peace to happen in Tibet, these clowns are willing to stamp out the symbol of what I believe is the greatest example of peace in the world. I think these clowns should be arrested and jailed for treason, because by definition, putting out the flame constitutes you turning your back on peace with many of the countries around the world.

I know some of my words are strong, but I do feel very strongly about this sort of thing. I’m not even that big a fan of the Olympic Games but I do believe the symbolism behind it to be of high moral value.

If you guys want something to protest against, go and help Anonymous take on that Church.

The OPEL has been given the government ‘fling out the back door‘, finally. So instead of the Australian public throwing nearly $1 billion at a company which kicks our collective asses with high broadband prices, instead we are now dedicated to throwing $4.7 billion of our hard-earned cash to a national broadband solution that is still full of conjecture and political promises. It could be a public FTTN (fibre to the node) network that invites competition and low prices, or it could be a national smoke-signal network since Telstra won’t sell us back the network the government decided, in its infinite wisdom, to flog off.

Now I’m not backing up OPEL (the Optus-Elders consortium) on this, since they received an extra $940-something million dollars from ‘crazy lady’ ex-Minister Helen Coonan, only a couple of months before the Liberals got given the public ‘fuck off’ call, and have given hardly any evidence that they deserve it. One of the stipulations of the grant was that the Optus-Elders consortium provide 90% coverage to highly-unserviced areas (a la, everywhere located outside an Australian capital city) and our new Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Stephen Conroy, has claimed that OPEL could only cough up around 78% coverage. I don’t know what school of business management the CEOs of those 2 companies went to, but shit, if someone threw nearly $1 billion of the taxpayers dosh at me and told me what needed to be done, I’d bloody well do it to the letter. Not for fear of what the government would do, but fear of what the public would do. To stuff up an endevour like this is like having a medicine ball thrown at your nuts. Your ego would be bruised forever.

So, our only alternative now is to wait and see what happens with the Labor Government’s $4.7 billion pledge to faster and more available broadband. Optus has a second chance, aligning with other Internet Service Providers like Internode and iiNet, arguably two very big players in the ISP community, but obviously, the main player hasn’t played ball with the rest of them, and that is Telstra. Saying ‘no’ to Optus for the first pledge is almost a tentative ‘yes’ to Telstra, but these next few months will be very interesting to say the least. If it’s Telstra selected, may God have mercy on us all.

I switched over to Linux at work recently, mostly due to our servers running on Linux and the opportunity of directly interfacing with the servers made my job a hell of a lot easier. No longer being able to use my trusty Macromedia Dreamweaver to do my work, I had to try out a couple of different PHP development solutions until I found the one that was right for me and could keep up with me.

And the winner is… VIM.

After playing around with software which promised the world, some which didn’t deliver, I grew to like the hidden simplicity of VIM. The development team leader at my work urged me to work with VIM, as it was the most simple and yet most powerful system to develop PHP with, and after so many functional but flawed pieces of PHP software, I’m inclined to agree with him. Here’s a couple of different PHP development solutions I tested in my search for a PHP editor and the pros and cons of each that I found. It should be noted that in each time, I fell back to VIM to complete my work when the PHP software was fighting with me to keep me from doing my work. Read more »

A bit of a laugh. Apparently my Big Brother: Internet Filtering is well and truly loved by someone (that someone being Google) because, as of Thursday February 14th 2008, I am:

#1 when searching ‘australian internet blacklist’ on Google
#3 when searching ‘australian government internet blacklist’ on Google
#5 when searching ‘australian government blacklist’ on Google
#16 when searching ‘australian blacklist’ on Google
#1 when searching ’shitty site’ on Google

Seems my blog’s days are numbered, I’m pretty sure the government will blacklist my site if it appears on all these search results.