Apple backups and RAID are not reliable

You’d think that if you use RAID1 and multiple redundant, distributed backups with hourly backups, daily backups, etc, you’d be safe? Think again. If your backup software lies to you, you may not realize it until it’s way too late. If you RAID software does not deem it worthy to mention that a disk failed, what good is it?

The Grizzly vs. the Frog

The Grizzly vs. the Frog

Guess who wins when you put a frog in front of a grizzly.

As a french national and entrepreneur myself, I am a bit appalled at how little our government understands the basics of economy. The way French Minister Arnaud Montebourg dealt with Mittal or Titan shows this crass ignorance. It does not save jobs, it just pisses investors off.

Here is one: when a US company wants to buy a plant, you don’t tell them to speak with the unions first. What if Arnaud Montebourg visited the US to negociate a big contract with US airlines to sell them planes, and was told by the US department to get in line at the airport front desk to talk with a company representative?…

Boiled frog syndrom: France has to stop thinking that unions are representative in economic matters. They are only relevant as far as people matters are concerned. For economics, French unions like the CGT have repeatedly demonstrated their ignorance.

The promise of glasses-free 3D – Dolby’s vision

The promise of glasses-free 3D – Dolby’s vision

The article is a little low on details. Based on the fact that the article mentions Philips displays, my guess is that this is based on the 2D+Z technology. In other words, the picture is split between a color map and a depth map.

The benefits of this approach is that it is easy to transmit over a regular channel, since the picture is basically the same size and format as a regular HDTV picture. The drawback is that the display has to reconstruct at least two images (and for auto-stereoscopic displays, several pictures) from the information.

It may seem simple to reconstruct the required pictures from a color map and a depth map. But in reality, it’s a bit problematic, because a single color map cannot encode both the color of the front objects and the color of the objects it hides.

Imagine for example that you have a plane in the front, and the sky in the background. The sky is blue, the plane is grey. Now, at the border of the plane, the gray hides the blue. But the two eyes don’t see this limit at the same exact location. It’s a phenomenon called parallax.

So what happens is that for at least one of the pictures, the system has to “invent” colors. Basically, it’s going to extrapolate the background color of the parts you can’s see based on the color of the parts you can see.

This is one of the drawbacks of the Philips approach compared to traditional stereoscopic and auto-stereoscopic systems that send all the pictures separately (meaning that they don’t need to invent colors).

This is not very visible on movies, if at all. That’s because borders of real objects tend to be a bit fuzzy. But for synthetic images as those created by Tao Presentations, this tends to cause relatively visible artifacts.

I wonder if Dolby solved that specific problem…

Everything is broken and no one cares

Everything is broken and no one cares

This post from Dear Apple is just so true, and so clearly on topic for Grenouille Bouillie!

Have we reached the point in complexity where we can’t make good quality products anymore? Or is that some kind of strategic choice?

The original post is mostly about Apple products, but the same is true with Linux, with Android, with Windows.

Here is my own list of additional bugs, focusing on those that can easily be reproduced:

1. Open a file named X in any of the new Apple applications, those without Save As. Open another file named Y. Save Y as X. Beachball. For every application. Worse yet, since applications often remember which windows were open, you get the beachball again when you reopen the application. It takes another force quit for the application to (fortunately) offer to not reopen the windows.
2. A relatively well known one now: Type F i l e : / / / in practically any OSX application. Without the spaces. Hang or assert depending on your luck.
3. Use a stereoscopic application like Tao Presentations (http://www.taodyne.com). Activate stereoscopy. Switch spaces or unplug an external monitor. Kernel panic or hang to be expected. Go tell to your customers that the kernel panic is Apple’s fault, not ours…
4. If you backup over the network, set your computer to sleep after say 1 hour while on power. Change your disk enough that the backup takes more than one hour. Backup disk will come up as corrupt after a couple of days, and OSX will suggest you start a new one (and the cycle will repeat).
5. Use the “Share” button. It takes forever to show up the window (like 2-3 seconds in general on my 2.6GHz quad-core i7 with 8GB of RAM). Since what I type generally begins with an uppercase letter, I usually prepare myself by having the finger on the shift key. But to that stupid animation framework, “shift” means “slow animation down so that Steve can demo it”. Steve is dead, but the “shift” behavior is still there.

I’ll keep updating this list as more come to mind. Add your own favorite bugs in the comments.

First update (Feb 13, 2013):

1. Safari often fails to refresh various portions of the screen. Visible in particular when used in combination with Redmine. This used to be very annoying, but it has gotten much better in more recent updates of Safari.
2. iTunes 11 no longer has Coverflow. It was a neat way to navigate in your music, which wasn’t even the default, why remove it?
3. Valgrind on OSX 10.8 is completely broken. I have no idea what’s wrong, but it’s a pretty useful tool for developers, and Apple has nothing in its own development tools that is even remotely close.
4. “Detect displays” is gone, both from the Monitors control panel and from the Monitors menu icon. Combine that with the fact that OSX 10.8, unlike its predecessors, sometimes totally fails to detect that you unplug a monitor. And you find yourself with windows stuck on a screen that is no longer there…
5. That little Monitor menu icon used to be quite handy, e.g. to select the right resolution when connecting to an external projector for the first time. Now, it’s entirely useless. It only offers mirroring, fails to show up 90% of the time when there is a possibility to do mirroring, shows up when mirroring is impossible (e.g. after you disconnected the projector). It used to be working and useful, it’s now broken and useless. What’s not to love?
6. Contacts used to have a way for me to format phone numbers the way I like. That’s gone. Now I have to accept the (broken) way it formats all phone numbers for me.
7. I used to be able to sync between iPhone and Contacts relatively reliably. Now, if there’s a way to remove a phone number, I’ve not found it. Old numbers I removed keep reappearing at the next sync, ensuring that I never know which of the 2, 3 or 4 phone numbers I have is the not dead one.
8. Still in Contacts, putting Facebook e-mail addresses as the first choice for my contacts? No thanks, it was heinous enough that Facebook replaced all genuine email addresses with @facebook.com aliases. But having that as the first one that pops up is really annoying.
9. Now fixed, but in the early 10.8, connecting a wired network when I also had Wifi on the same network would not give me higher speed. It would just drop all network connectivity.

Updated February 28th after restoring a machine following a serious problem:

1. Time machine restores are only good if your target disk is at least as big. But with Apple’s recent move to SSD, this may no longer be affordable to you. In my case, I’d like to squeeze 1TB of data into 512G. Time machine does not give me the level of fine-grained control I’d need to restore what I really need. So I need to try and do it manually, which is a real pain.
2. Calendar sync is a real mess. Restoring calendars from a backup is worse.
3. Spaces? Where are my good old spaces? Why is it I had spaces on the original machine, no longer have them, and find myself unable to say “I want 6 spaces” or to setup keyboard shortcuts for them as they used to be.

Building a 3D clock in under 10 minutes

In this screencast, I show how you can build a dynamic, real-time clock in less than 10 minutes with Tao Presentations.

Coding a DNA strand in 3D

In this live coding session, we demonstrate how to quickly create a DNA strand in 3D:

The whole code is below:

import LuckyStarsTheme
theme "LuckyStars"

picture_slide "Did DNA come from outer space?", 
    light 0
    light_position 1000, 1000, 1000
    translate -300, 0, -300
    rotatey mouse_x
    random_seed 12345
    dna_strand with -30 .. 30

slide "Arguments in favor", 
    * "Tardigrades can live in space"


dna_strand N:integer -> 
    locally 
        translatey 50 * N
        rotatey 10 * N
        locally 
            rotatey 90
            color "#BBB"
            cylinder 0, 0, 0, 10, 10, 200
        dna_base_pair random (0, 3)

dna_base_pair N:integer -> 
    dna_base_color N mod 4
    sphere 100, 0, 0, 40
    dna_base_color (N + 2) mod 4
    sphere -100, 0, 0, 40
    dna_base_name 140, N mod 4
    dna_base_name -140, (N + 2) mod 4

dna_base_color 0 -> color "red"
dna_base_color 1 -> color "blue"
dna_base_color 2 -> color "green"
dna_base_color 3 -> color "grey"

dna_base_name X:integer, N:integer -> 
    text_box X, 0, 40, 40, 
        font "Arial", 30
        color "white"
        align 0.5
        vertical_align 0.5
        dna_base_text N

dna_base_text 0 -> text "C"
dna_base_text 1 -> text "A"
dna_base_text 2 -> text "G"
dna_base_text 3 -> text "T"

Is it worth disputing the title of “first 3D game on a PC” to John Carmack?

Recently, someone posted a comment on “The Dawn of 3D Games” which I suppose disputed the vaguely stated claim that I wrote the first 3D game for a PC. So I felt like I had to reply and give my point of view on exactly why me, myself and I alone consider that Alpha Waves was a small milestone in the history of 3D gaming.

In reality, there is in my opinion not a single “first 3D game on a PC”, but for a given definition of what a 3D game is, you have a first one that matched these criteria. And for a set of criteria that seems to be relatively reasonable to me (like: it has to be a game, it has to run on some kind of PC or microcomputer, it has to be true 6-axis 3D on a reasonable portion of the screen, and you need some kind of immersion and interaction with a large number of objects), Alpha Waves may very well be the very first. Change a tiny bit in the definition, and some other game gets the crown. So let’s put it that way: Alpha Waves was innovative, and that’s my personal favorite for the title, for obvious reasons.

All that doesn’t matter much, except that in my attempt at documenting this bit of useless ancient geek history, I visited the id Software web site, and I was surprised to see that there’s still the following on their web site:

The first 3D PC game ever! Hovertank 3D debuted the amazing technology that was used to usher in the First Person Shooter genre with Wonfenstein 3D.

Is this a boiled frog approach to marketing? Just by leaving patently wrong stuff on the web site long enough, folks will stop noticing and end up thinking it’s true?

Come on, John! I hesitate writing that about Alpha Waves, when it predated Hovertank by a good year and had a significantly better 3D rendering (if only because it had three axis of rotation). And Alpha Waves is by no mean alone, there are easily half a dozen games predating Hovertank and offering better 3D. You are a celebrity in the world of video games. With all the credit that is due, why do you need to keep this little lie on your web site?

Why does it matter? Precisely because you are a celebrity, so everything you say has a huge impact, including minute details of wording in a long-forgotten corner of an old web site you probably don’t even remember existed. Nonetheless, just fix it. Simply write something like “The first id game ever.” That would do just fine. And that claim is a significant milestone in its own right. Probably a bigger one than “first 3D game on the PC”, as far as the gaming industry is concerned…

And if you feel concerned about your personal place in history, I’m sure Armadillo Aerospace will take care of that.