So I’ve launched a new blog named Beautiful Fractals. I recognize the name might make you believe the fractals I make and post are beautiful and I’m on a huge ego trip but that’s certainly not the case nor the intention I wish to convey with the naming.

The meaning behind the name is quite simply about the inherent beauty in the fractals themselves that made me choose the name. I find them incredibly fascinating for some reason and I love working in Apophysis trying to produce something nice.

Each fractal posted you can download as wallpaper in different resolutions and enjoy.

The awesomeness factor is off the scale.

Link

However, the last couple of weeks I’ve been using it on battery only here and a problem surfaced. When the battery indicator goes down to around 40 minutes left the machine shuts down. No warning at all whatsoever.

The OS X System Profiler and Coconut Battery showed me a cycle count of 15. That translates into not-a-whole-lot for 9 months of use! Remembering some business about an Apple battery recall last year I thought my battery qualified for that but the serial didn’t match apart from the first A1175. My battery’s serial ends with “TY4B”.

Last night when I went to sleep the battery indicator said 100% charged. Currently and for the last couple of hours it has been at 97%.

So I called Apple support and a new battery is now on its way with UPS. Should be here in 10 days or so.

UPDATE 2008/sep/15:

The replacement battery had the same symptoms and after 35 cycles its capacity was roughly 1000 mAh. Lame. Called Apple support and they wouldn’t do a fucking thing because the MacBook Pro was over two years old. Lame.

Also in the timespan since the replacement the logic board also keeled over and had to be replaced. Lame.

Lesson learned:

Apple hardware sucks and is of seriously low quality. I take extremely good care of my laptops and I’ve never had problems before I bought a MacBook. Infact, the MacBook is the one I’ve carried around the least.

I just stumbled across this great little plugin called Footnotes made by Duane Johnson.

Basicly what it does is enhance the standard error page to include links in the different traces which when clicked will take you straight back to TextMate for easier debugging. Nifty.

You also get a series of links at the bottom of a successfully rendered page whereby you can easily see session, cookies and the log for instance or jump straight to the view or controller file.

Footnotes is hosted at TextMate’s home MacroMates.com and is installable the usual way by:

./script/plugin install http://macromates.com/svn/Bundles/trunk/Bundles/Rails.tmbundle/Support/plugins/footnotes/

or if you want to check it out without adding it to your repository:

cd vendor/plugins
svn export http://macromates.com/svn/Bundles/trunk/Bundles/Rails.tmbundle/Support/plugins/footnotes/

Restart your server and enjoy.

I found it lacking a bit in the CSS department so you might want to tweak the plugins insert_styles method in the textmate_footnotes.rb file if you find the links unreadable.

Personally I tweaked it to:

<style type="text/css">
  #tm_footnotes_debug {background-color: #000; padding-top: 5px; margin-top: 0.5em; text-align: center; color: #999;}
  #tm_footnotes_debug * {color: #CCC;}
  #tm_footnotes_debug a {text-decoration: none; color: #bbb;}
  #tm_footnotes_debug pre {overflow: scroll;}
   fieldset.tm_footnotes_debug_info {text-align: left; border: 1px dashed #aaa; padding: 1em; margin: 1em 2em 1em 2em; color: #777;}
</style>

Paul Graham has a new essay out called Microsoft is Dead. Obviously caused a bit of a stir in the groups of people not getting it.

Personally I laughed out loud reading the last line of the last paragraph.

We managed to get Ten Club (fan club) tickets for the Munich, Düsseldorf, London and Copenhagen Pearl Jam shows. What a fucking blast that is going to be.

I’m obviously looking very much forward to their return to Danish soil for the first time since the Roskilde tragedy in 2000. The show in Forum, Copenhagen will no doubt be very special.

Largely unreported in the world media – as usual. The US fucks up again.

“The herdsmen had gathered with their animals around large fires at night to ward off mosquitoes. But lit up by the flames, they became latest victims of America’s war on terror.”

Link to story

TIME.com has a great selection of political cartoons of the year. Link here.

Not being one to follow crowds I decided to try out Second Life to see what all the buzz / hype was about. After a gruelling long tutorial I finally enter the actual “game”. It’s not a game in the classic sense but a huge virtual community where just about anything virtual is possible.

When you enter Second Life you don’t have a dime on your hands but there are many ways to get Linden dollars which is the currency used in Second Life. One way of earning some green is by standing on a stupid little pad in some party like area for ten minutes or so and dance. That’ll give you a few bucks. The dancing happens automatically so you can just kick back an watch your avatar groove.

Obviously this technique requires sadomasochistic tendencies to endure for more than two minutes. This has to be the loser thing to do.

It so happens that prostitution is a well established trade in Second Life. Who’d have thought it? So tomorrow or sometime soon I’ll see if I can vamp myself into some nice little hoochie whore from hell and suck some Linden green from unsuspecting Jack the Ripper wannabes.

As you can tell I’m struggling to find myself in this game.

Grande, grande, grande.