The week finished off well. Thursday was Eddingtons which is really good even though it's a little expensive. It also was lots of U2 day, which was nice. OS X is far from being able to be classified as a real-time OS though. That's the biggest thing that bugs me about it, although I'm guessing most people don't notice it. I'm used to be able to push my machine at 100% with CPU and disk IO pegged, but no app being able to take out the system. Music doesn't skip, I click to a different app and other than possibly having to swap it in if I'm really pushing the machine, it's instant. Focus changes instantly rather than waiting for apps... Yea, it's designed for lighter load, but it doesn't seem like it'd be that hard to implement that type of design. I think the biggest catch may be that part of the smooth integrated GUI is being overly reliant on checking the state of other things obsessively so they can't get out of sync though. :( Anyways, the days involved lots of group policies. Ross and I got a lot of things clarified, and I think we're going the direction of making some stuff work better. In other news I discovered a completely unpatched (no Service Packs even) NT4 server. Amazingly it has like 5 months uptime too. Hopefully it'll last another 2 or so until it can be phased out (and hopefully that won't turn into 12). Friday afternoon turned into meetings, which went better than expected, even if they went a bit long. It could have been a lot worse. For fun stuff, did you know that going to church is a threat to your health?

Oops. I think it was an OOM condition. Firefox had just died after it and Thunderbird started the hard drive rattling like crazy. I've handled those under linux no problem (gotten loads over 600 on my laptop and recovered without even affecting any other apps than the troublemakers), but apparently the darwin kernel doesn't handle it as well and the GUI starts seriously lagging when the Disk IO goes crazy. Something doesn't seem right about that - it's actually one of my biggest complaints about OS X. Any time the CPU is pegged and there's much IO (and the load is above 5 or so) or the disk, the machine starts beachballing whenever you click stuff until it recovers. Huh. scp claims I uploaded that image at 9.1MB/sec. I wouldn't mind it if that was true.

Pretty usual week, thus the lack of posts. Friday night ended up rebuilding my powerbook since the partitioning tools from Apple suck. There's no good reason to not allow changing partitions on a system drive (I could see the system partition maybe, but not others). It seems to be running better for the most part. This time I actually went through custom and chose not to install the stuff I never used anyways (and discovered used way too much space). That includes iCal, iPhoto, iDVD, iMovie, GarageBand and the like. Unfortunately they still include too much crap. Like Address Book, Chess, iChat, Internet Connect, Mail, and Stickies. They already have a custom install, why make us still have to delete a bunch of crap afterwords? At least it still sorta resembles it's unix roots and I was able to drop in my home directory and have it work. Why it can't be on it's own partition you never have to touch when reinstalling without worrying about the partitioning issue if you want to move space around though...

Saturday was a busy day. Woke up in the morning to some pages from idiots who decided our blocking them from the mail servers meant they should try again in the middle of the night from a different machine (this one doesn't look quite as cracked). It was rather nice of them to include paging the sysadmins as part of the spam run though... Then there was a Soccer game followed by Football. It was cold and the lens didn't like the cold much. I had to help it focusing occationally, and still ended up with an unfortunate number of not-quite-focused shots. After the football game ended up taking some pics up at seminary since I was there and there was a good view with the colors and the lake. Took a look at the inter-building cable runs too since I hadn't been up there since they went in - interesting. After that was off to my parents' place for dinner since it was my mom's birthday. Pizza, followed by Radio. Good movie, good story.

Sunday was Salem and listening to Politics in church. That was interesting. Then some sitting around the house. Finished off the day by watching 3 movies. Started with Red Dragon. It's definitely an interesting story, seemed stronger and doesn't seem as held back as the other two. Second was The Shining. Seems like a failure compared to Kubrick's other films. I heard bad things about it, but tried to think it couldn't be so bad. So the movie starts off with the shadow of the helicopter they're shooting from visible in the shot - and doesn't get any better. Oh well, I guess they can't all be perfect. I ended up realigning my projector a bit during this one. Finished off the night with Conspiracy Theory. I liked that movie. It's one of those ones where there's action and they reverse the plot a ton of times. Some people like those, some don't. And now I need to get up early again tomorrow, so that's it.