Archive for the ‘Tech’ Category

This was a quite irksome when Steam was released for mac and it wouldn’t work on my Macbook, due to running a case sensitive drive. It was quite odd, but I guess the default these days is to let programs do what they will.

I found an excellent walk through below on how to get things up and running. It’s a workaround and has some issues if you are a sysadmin type. I did it, it works and I’m up and running with Steam even if it’s running in it’s own disk image.

Remember to move the Steam.app to the disk image prior to creating the alias and enjoy.

You can see the walkthrough here

It looks like the rumors are true. Valve is bringing Steam to Mac OSX and soon.

How soon? How does next month, April 2010 sound?

Valve announced today it will bring Steam, Valve’s gaming service, and Source, Valve’s gaming engine, to the Mac.

Steam and Valve’s library of games including Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, Portal, and the Half-Life series will be available in April.

“As we transition from entertainment as a product to entertainment as a service, customers and developers need open, high-quality Internet clients,” said Gabe Newell, President of Valve. “The Mac is a great platform for entertainment services.”

“Our Steam partners, who are delivering over a thousand games to 25 million Steam clients, are very excited about adding support for the Mac,” said Jason Holtman, Director of Business Development at Valve. “Steamworks for the Mac supports all of the Steamworks APIs, and we have added a new feature, called Steam Play, which allows customers who purchase the product for the Mac or Windows to play on the other platform free of charge. For example, Steam Play, in combination with the Steam Cloud, allows a gamer playing on their work PC to go home and pick up playing the same game at the same point on their home Mac. We expect most developers and publishers to take advantage of Steam Play.”

*** Update The Beta is coming to a close and Steam for Mac should be available in two days on May 12th 2010. ***

With Mac growing in market share to well over 10% it is becoming a much more viable target for software and entertainment.

I’m sure there are some companies that currently specialize in Mac Ports that won’t be as happy that this is happening.

For the rest of us who have been struggling with Wine, Cross Over and other ways of getting Steam working on our Macs, it is excellent news.

Sounds like the additions to the Source Engine will make Mac development integrated with the PC development.

Portal 2 will be Valve’s first simultaneous release for Mac and Windows. “Checking in code produces a PC build and Mac build at the same time, automatically, so the two platforms are perfectly in lock-step,” said Josh Weier, Portal 2 Project Lead. “We’re always playing a native version on the Mac right alongside the PC. This makes it very easy for us and for anyone using Source to do game development for the Mac.”

Bring it on!

Ciao,

Shane

The @home distributed computing method has been around for several years now.

What is distributed computing? In short, it’s being able to break a large piece of work into smaller pieces and send them to computers around the world to work on in their spare cycles. Everyday folks like you and can download some software and complete work units while our computers aren’t doing other things.

Most techies are aware of SETI@home which is the search for extra terrestrials. System Administrators have been running up instances of SETI@home for years and years on servers with very light loads. SETI@home takes sections of “space” and chunks it down for the distributed computer cluster to look for radio transmissions.

In the last decade distributed computing model has started being used for more projects. Some of the more exciting projects of late have been medical. One that I’m getting excited about and am contributing to is FOLDING@home.

From the FOLDING@home website

What is protein folding and how is folding linked to disease?
Proteins are biology’s workhorses — its “nanomachines.” Before proteins can carry out these important functions, they assemble themselves, or “fold.” The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, in many ways remains a mystery.

Moreover, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. “misfold”), there can be serious consequences, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes.

You can help by simply running a piece of software.
Folding@home is a distributed computing project — people from throughout the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer takes the project closer to our goals. Folding@home uses novel computational methods coupled to distributed computing, to simulate problems millions of times more challenging than previously achieved.

I don’t know about you, but I tend to collect computers. I have at least 3 laptops that hang around not doing anything as they’ve been replaced with something better. I know, isn’t the life of the consultant lavish and exciting?

The upshot is that I’d like to do something to help out, so have run up FOLDING@home on a couple of these machines, and when we’re settled in our new place will organize things a little better and see how much I can help.

I setup a team account to track the amount of work the different computers do, team orangesands.

There are some monster teams out there, they have websites and forums dedicated to helping members setup and maintain their FOLDING@home rigs. Some of the members are running, racks and racks of servers in their homes, with the primary focus of those machines to chew through work units of protein folding. I don’t think I’ll get to that stage, but I would like to pitch in and certainly have the spare machines to help.

If you’d like to check it out, swing on over to the Standford University folding site

I might even run up a page to keep track of how the hive is going.

Cheers,
Shane

Stacey called me up the other day and started raving about the Kindle 2. I know of the Kindle but haven’t seen one and have thought they were kind of gimmicky.

My wife isn’t exactly a gadget geek like I am. So for her to start getting excited about the Kindle got me intrigued. I started looking into them a little and it seems pretty cool.

For those who’ve been under a rock the last couple of years. The Kindle is an ebook reader from Amazon. It’s designed to give a similar reading experience to paper, with the added benefit of carrying a thousand books around with you.

Kindle 2 takes what was a good thing and makes it better by adding additional colours, TTS (Text to Speech), longer battery life and host of other bits and bobs that seem nice to have. It’s still an expensive bit of kit to just go try but the reviews are all seeming positive.

I usually like to sit down with a paper book in hand, but I’m willing to give it a shot. With Stacey and I contemplating a trip or two around the states full time RVing, space will be at a premium and it would be good to read what I wanted without taking up so much storage.

Still need to look through the catalogue and make sure all the stuff I like is in there like Clive Cussler, Anne McCaffery and technical books on programming etc.

Here’s a little blurb that shows it off nicely.

Kindle 2: Get it at Amazon

From the Runway to the Road is the catch phrase for the Terrafugia Transition that could be in showrooms within a couple of years.

Below is a short video showing how the Transition would land and then change to car mode and head home.

On the surface, I’m thrilled at the thought that for the price of a small plane, I could have a vehicle that could turn into a car at either end of the trip. Then I start thinking of what’s going to happen to airspace as more and more of these things start to fill up the sky. Are they going to require a Pilots license to fly? I would certainly hope so, as that alone would cut down on the the numbers of them in the sky.

I still think it’s a great idea and while not as space age as the Moeller Skycar, looks to be more likely to get off the ground and into production. Pun intended.

It’s already looking nice. You can get one in 2011 if you place your $200k order today.

I’ll take two.

Below I just found a short flight from Terrafugia of a scale model RC version of the Transition. Flight seems nice and stable.

Cheers,
Shane