Some tips found here: http://macournoyer.wordpress.com/2007/10/11/3-simple-tips-to-make-your-rails-app-100-times-faster/
Tag: computing
I need a new computer in order to play Half-Life 2 and Mass Effect. The latter states that the minimum specifications to play it are:
- OS: Windows XP/Vista * Processor: Single Core: 2.4 GHz or faster / Multiple Cores: 2.0 GHz or faster
- Memory: XP: 1.0 GB RAM / Vista: 2.0 GB RAM
- Hard Drive: 15 GB (30 GB for Digital Download)
- DVD Drive: 1 SPEED (Not required for Digital Download)
- Video Card: 256 MB with Pixel Shader 3.0 support*
- Sound Card: DirectX 9.0c compatible
I’m guessing that would also work for HL2.
I’m a little late to the party, and I haven’t read the novel nor have I played the game. (Our home PC isn’t up to the task just yet.) But I did just finish reading the review for Mass Effect: Revelation the novel that came out in June 2007 and the review for the game Mass Effect which came out in October 2007.
Yes, once upon a time, films were renditions of novels or short stories. Then, later, in the wake of a (or “the” for some) blockbuster Star Wars, novels were commissioned after a successful vehicle was established. Where movies blazed the trail, games followed, and so we already have a trilogy of novels set in the Halo universe. (The notion of a “story universe” is something that I think the science fiction genre established rather early on, but I could be wrong and would love to hear from anyone who has a better sense of the history.) It is indeed the case that Mass Effect was conceived first as a game, but in an effort to help build up interest in the game — so, a form of marketing — and in an effort to provide more backstory in order to make game play more interesting, the game’s makers commissioned a novel to precede the game. Not a prequel after the fact, but a prequel before the fact. (Imagine that.)
To my mind, this opens up a huuuuge new and fascinating landscape for fiction. (I hate the term “storytelling” if only because it gets not only over-used but often misused. Not everything is telling a story. Sometimes you’re describing. Sometimes you’re arguing. Please, let’s not confuse everything because it’s fun to say, or safe to say, you’re telling a story.) In this landscape, or network or nexus or whatever, you can allow each medium to do what it does best. Literary texts are often the best way to provide a rich description or provide a backstory — why else does voiceover work so well in so many flashbacks? Game play is great for immersive action. The same goes for audio, video, and images. It’s all so cool. I can’t wait to beef up the home PC and take a crack at the game, but I’ll be sure to read the book first…
I wasn’t sure if I had ever updated Rails on my MBP, and so, as I begin developing my first real project, I thought it was time. A regular gem update didn’t work. I had to use sudo:
sudo gem update rails --include-dependencies The same applied for gem cleanup, which deleted the following items — after asking me for confirmation:
Successfully uninstalled rails-1.2.6
Successfully uninstalled rake-0.7.3
Successfully uninstalled actionwebservice-1.2.3
Successfully uninstalled activerecord-1.15.3
Successfully uninstalled actionmailer-1.3.3
Successfully uninstalled actionpack-1.13.3
Successfully uninstalled activesupport-1.4.2 I now have to do the same on the iMac.
In order to join the Humanities Computing mailing list, you have to apply. One part of the application requires that you compose a short biography about yourself with your interest in humanities computing as the focus. Here’s what I wrote:
I am a folklorist whose primary field of interest is human ingenuity. While I have published on linguistic/literary topics, my primary interest is in material culture. My interest in computing has two dimensions: I am interested in technology itself as a manifestation of techné and because it helps me solve problems, both through its application as well as in grappling with it as a craft in and of itself. (I should also admit that I am the son of a mother and father who were themselves gadget freaks and firmly believed that technology, as the manifestation of progress itself, was capable of solving almost any problem. I inherited, I confess, some of their optimism.)
I am currently at work on a book about boats that go on land and water here in south Louisiana. These are clearly technological creations, and computing offers me two things: (1) a better way to describe the archeological record I am creating — through the use of CAD and 3D modeling software — and (2) it gives me some opportunity to make machines of my own — I am currently teaching myself how to script in Ruby and I run my personal website on Rails. I had no formal education in computer science or in programming, and so this is a logic that is fairly foreign to me. Frankly, it makes my head hurt on a regular basis. But in making my head hurt, I am — I hope — training myself to think in new ways, to see new things in what I already know, and learning to communicate complex relationships in another language, in much the same way that I am trying to convert the complex relationships contained within these metal machines into words.
I have for some time been thinking about computers and networks as the new platform not only for study but also for communication, and I have done a fair amount of experimentation in that direction. (There will be more on my website, http://johnlaudun.org/, shortly, but I am slowly rebuilding it and that rebuilding will be delayed by the Project Bamboo meeting later this week.)
I have experimented with using computing as a platform for teaching. Please see the current version of the Louisiana Survey of Folk Culture at http://code.google.com/p/louisianasurvey for the first survey. My idea there — I’m not claiming it was that grand or that well done — was that having students who were taking their first, and typically their only, folklore class write long, synthetic essays was an exercise frustration for both them and me. Better to involve them in some larger project where their steps were straightforward but the edifice within which they worked provided a path toward synthesis. Out of that, we began a wiki that allowed students to index discrete items — like jokes, anecdotes, dites — by genre, teller, location, use, etc. … goodness, this got long. Sorry.
Here’s what I have done so far:
- CTRL-Clicked in the “Click to Add Printer” Pane of Print & Fax in System Preferences and RESET the printing system.
- Deleted the /Library/Printers/Canon/BJPrinter directory.
- Deleted the /CFMSupport/BJExtDDI.cfm file.
- Restarted my computer.
- Downloaded the latest Canon install package, mp600osxpd583ej7.dmg, with a creation date of 2007-11-08.
- Installed the Canon MP600 583.pkg package.
- Restarted my computer.
- Reconnected the MP600 to the Airport Extreme.
- Returned to Print & Fax, clicked on Add Printer. The MP 600 turns up in the dialogue window that comes up and is listed as a Bonjour Device.
- I clicked ADD.
- The process hangs until I get an error sheet:
An error occurred while trying to add the selected printer. Error:-9672
Console messages:
3/17/08 19:07:02 [0x0-0x14014].com.apple.print.add[216] Error -9672, badly formatted ticket XML - Bad XMLStart:
3/17/08 19:07:02 [0x0-0x14014].com.apple.print.add[216] Bad XMLEnd Every 8 seconds one of these is getting posted to the console:
3/17/08 19:18:36 mDNSResponder[22] Error getting external address 3 Every 40 seconds CUPS Access_log is getting one of these:
localhost - - [17/Mar/2008:19:14:24 -0500] "POST / HTTP/1.1" 200 1941 CUPS-Get-Devices -In everyday usage, the word platform usually means a surface raised above ground level in order to accomplish some task. One such task of platforms is at public events, so that performers or speakers may be seen and heard quite literally above the audience or crowd, and hence the ideas upon which a group founds itself are sometimes called a platform. It made sense, then to extend the metaphor even further within the realm of computing to be “the standards that set the parameters for what a system can and cannot do.” The notion generally refers to the microprocessor at the heart of the computer’s hardware or the operating system which orchestrates interactions between the user and the hardware. In essence, a platform is an agreed upon set of conventions. Within a computing platform, there are agreed upon ways to interact with the kernel — there is, in fact, a term for this: API or “application programming interface.”
In less technological realms, political parties establish platforms, and those who wish to run for public office agree to abide by an agreed upon set of tenets or ideals when allying themselves with one party or another. Using platform in this fashion reveals that we live in a world of platforms — the irony of the “platform shooter” within the video game world should not be lost here — if we imagine that platforms are spaces within which we agree to live by a certain set of rules.
Television and cinema are one such platform: though there is room for negotiation on quantity and quality, everyone agrees that images and sound are central to publishing on that platform. If you want to work within that industry, then it’s incumbent on you to learn the basics of good shots — sound, lighting, composition — and how to edit those shots into a montage that conveys your idea. There are further refinements of the platform, depending upon what you want to achieve. If your goal is to produce the next great sitcom or next great Discovery documentary, then you will need to understand and abide by the conventions established within those forms. Please note that none of this precludes innovating within a platform, across platforms, or developing new platforms.
Arguably, the personal computer and the internet have become not only a new platform but also one that can deliver other, older media platforms like television and radio. The innovation it has spawned as a result of not only absorbing those older platforms but also shaking up the conventions within which they operated can easily be seen in the rise of the “podcast.” Formerly, radio programming was bound by clocks, because it went out as a live broadcast or stream and viewers could not tune in later to catch the same program. This meant a viewer had to know when a program began and ended. It became the convention to start programs either on the hour or the half hour, in order to make it easier for viewers to remember when a program aired. That meant a program had to be in increments of half hours, at the very least.
But suppose one didn’t have half an hour of content? Too bad — for the viewer that is — expand it to fit the space. But it turns out that a lot can get done in ten minutes, and the ten-minute podcast is a rather common length. With the rise of personal computers and the internet, immensely powerful forms of data aggregation and analysis as well as communication of syntheses in topic-appropriate media became something within reach of individuals and not the exclusive domain of institutions and industries.
I originally wrote the above as the prelude to a course syllabus for on computing in the humanities. I concluded the syllabus with:
The goal of this course is to introduce participants to the basic elements of the computing platform: the creation of texts/data and manipulation in order to arrive at new insights, interpretations, and knowledge.
And then I offered up the following units:
The Command Line. The humanistic user of any platform should have a reflexive understanding of the very basics of its operations. In the case of the computer, the place to start is the command line. In this unit, we will learn how to: log into the shell, understand and navigate directory hierarchies, create and edit texts using an editor (e.g., Nano, vi, emacs).
Working with Texts. After creating and editing texts, we need to be able to search quickly through them for things they have in common in order to discern larger patterns. In this unit, we will: manipulate texts using grep, sed, and other shell programs including the use of options and pipes to control results; work with regular expressions.
From Texts to Data. It doesn’t take long before the average writer or scholar has not only a wide variety of texts but also a great umber of them. Keeping such a large number of texts organized and being able to call up relevant results when needed is best achieved by committing information to a database. There are a variety of database options, free ones even, but the emergent standard for basic tasks is MySQL.
Of Packets and Ports. The nature of communication. How is information exchanged?
The Structure of Things. There are a confusing array of MLs out there. The two most common are HTML and XML, but their approach to describing data and documents is different enough that we need to spend some time talking about different needs and approaches. In this unit we will explore the differences between document structure (HTML) and information structure (XML).
Outputs. None of our research and productivity means much if the data we have collected, the information we have developed, and the knowledge we have created isn’t made accessible and/or public.