Impressions

Revenge of the Sith Soundtrack Impressions

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As I begin to suffer from that frequent disease that relapses every time a Star Wars movie comes out which makes me buy every product in sight, I came home from work yesterday with a copy of the Revenge of the Sith soundtrack in tow. When it comes to Star Wars produce the soundtrack is always one of the least regrettable purchases simply because John Williams’ superb compositions are one of the few things that has been reliably good across the whole saga. As much as I disliked Attack of the Clones, I still find Across The Stars to be a wonderful piece of music.

Like the film itself, this soundtrack is the one that has to tie everything together. You have the love themes and the hinted return of the Imperial March carried over from AOTC, and then you have the first appearances of A New Hope’s themes for Luke and Darth Vader. Even the victory theme from the end of A New Hope makes an appearance. Of course, in addition to this there’s a lot of new and suitably-dark overtures for the well-known battles that are set to take place and one of them, Battle of the Heroes, which you can hear a sample of here (requires iTunes), is simply one of the best pieces of music I’ve heard in a while.

I don’t know if the themes from this one will ever be as iconic as the likes of the Imperial March, but nonetheless this one remains an excellent show from John Williams as probably the best original composer working in Hollywood today.

As an extra incentive, the CD comes bundled with a bonus DVD entitled “Star Wars: A Musical Journey”. Running at around 70 minutes (including introductions to the various pieces; an hour without) and available for your listening pleasure in Dolby Digital 5.1 or uncompressed PCM stereo, it’s basically the story condensed into an hour and told almost entirely through music with very little dialogue – probably a good thing with the prequels. It’s not as pretentious and arty-fartsy as it sounds; it’s just an interesting way to listen to a lot of the music from all six movies condensed in such a way that you can sit down for an hour and watch/listen to it.

If you’re a fan of these scores and for some reason you aren’t picking up a copy yourself, the bonus DVD is a great addition to the package. It’s only like £9.99 online (I’ve seen it for as little as £11.99 on the high street), so you don’t have an excuse not to pick it up.

General

IGN Readers’ Top 100 Games

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If you ever needed proof that the average person has the attention span of a gnat, look no further than the IGN Readers’ Top 100 Games, where the top ten games of all time are supposed to be the following:

  1. Resident Evil 4
  2. Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
  3. Splinter Cell Chaos Theory
  4. Chrono Trigger
  5. Half-Life 2
  6. God of War
  7. Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater
  8. Soul Calibur
  9. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
  10. Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past

All of those are very good games – there’s no doubt about it – but RE4, Chaos Theory, God of War, MGS3, and GTA San Andreas (a close one, but I think GTA3 was the better game) are rated as in the top 10 games of all time!? San Andreas is the oldest and that’s barely six months old, and several of them are less than a month old. Even the perennial favourite of people who’d never played an RPG before 1997, Final Fantasy VII, could only make #29 – obviously too old for people to remember – behind such timeless classics as Devil May Cry 3 (March 2005), Gran Turismo 4 (February 2005), Madden 2005 (August 2004), and Ratchet and Clank: Up Your Arsenal (November 2004).

I’d be embarrassed to have even voted on that list, and it’s exactly why any popular thing which is voted for by the public, though lucrative (lots of ad revenue for IGN and those £1/text things on TV are even more so), is utterly worthless. People can’t remember beyond what they had for breakfast.

General

Curiosity (Nearly) Killed The Mac

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You have my permission to kick me if you ever hear me saying that even an idiot could mess up an OS X system. If that’s the case I must be more than an idiot because I nearly rendered my Mac unusable, ably demonstrating how an urge to meddle and something less than a comprehensive knowledge can really land you in it.

When installing Tiger yesterday afternoon I’d accidentally installed about 1.5GB of language files that I was never going to need so a quick Google search found Monolingual, a utility to remove unwanted ones. I ran that to remove all languages except English, and then removed all input options except English and Japanese since that’s all I need. Everything works fine so I open up Firefox to go check some message boards, only to find that I can’t type anything. Certain keys which aren’t language-specific (control, command, option, shift, etc) work but no alphabet or number keys. I go into the language preferences and find that the English keyboard layout has gone. Shit.

I try everything I can think of to get it back – reinstall from the OS X disc, download it, etc – but as anyone familiar with OS X knows, it requires an admin password to do anything that affects the OS, including booting from a CD to reformat. I have no way to type my password which basically means I have no way to do anything about it. By now I’m very worried and having visions of sending my iBook away for a month again and losing all my data as Apple reformat it for me. I’m in a huge catch 22 because I need to install the input menu to type but I need to type my password to install the input menu.

The Monolingual site suggests in their FAQ that I can restore it by copying it from another Mac, and thankfully there’s a Powerbook in the other room, so I browse the the relevant location over the network and try to copy it over. No dice. I don’t have the priviledges to copy files from that directory. So I physically go to that computer and copy the files to their desktop, and since I won’t be able to copy them into that directory on my iBook over the network I run back and copy them to my desktop and then into the relevant folder. I need to type my admin password. Shit again.

Now back in the same conundrum as before, I start despondently searching the options for some way to save myself from myself. That’s when my saviour presented itself – Remote Login. I’m no UNIX god, but I certainly know enough to be able to copy some files through the Terminal. I enable it and rush to the computer with every appendage crossed, making it hard to rush very fast, and fire up Terminal on the Powerbook.

ssh Olly@192.168.0.4

I type my password and it logs me in, and finally I can see the end of the tunnel.

cd ~/Desktop
sudo cp -r Keyboard\ Layouts /System/Library/

I get no errors so I assume all is well, and there is much rejoicing. I restart the iBook to be safe and open Firefox to try typing, and breathe one of the biggest sighs of relief of my life when it responds. I’ve lost Japanese support (I just did an archive and install of Tiger to get it back) but I managed to do it. Learn from my mistakes and don’t mess around with parts of operating systems that you don’t know about when they’re designed to be secure against people modifying them. It’s usually fixable but not without aging yourself ten years.

Impressions

OS X Tiger First Impressions

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I’ve had a few hours to play with Tiger now and so far I’m very impressed. The first thing to note is that Apple have taken what was a very fast operating system and have improved the performance to a noticeable degree. There have been reports about this appearing over the last few weeks (this one came out today), but it’s to an extent that you really do notice – everyday tasks are snappier, web pages render faster in both Firefox and Safari, programs open faster, and 3D performance is up in a possible forerunner to Apple’s rumoured game division.

The most hyped feature was Spotlight, the new metadata search that can instantly find any file on your hard drive whether you’re searching for the actual name or a part of the contents. No trailing through the whole drive every time – the OS makes an index that can be queried on-the-fly as you type your search terms. Everything from Word documents to PDF files and the contents of text layers in PSD files can be searched. This is one feature that I didn’t seem myself using much but it’s actually fast enough that it’s quicker to open Spotlight and type “holiday photos” than it is to navigate to it in the Finder. I find it useful with only around 30GB of files, so I’d imagine that it’s indispensible to someone with a ton of Word documents and images.

Dashboard may be a shameless ripoff of Konfabulator, but it’s integrated into the OS and, as a first-party app, is going to be supported far more. There are already something like 40 widgets on release day and you can bet that far more are on the way as people realise the potential of the tiny apps. Automator is a very nice way to make tedious tasks very quick without having to learn AppleScript which will get limited use from me but will be very useful on the odd occasion that I need to resize and compress a dozen images or something like that. Half an hour’s Photoshopping can be reduced to a couple of clicks.

Quicktime 7 and its new H.264 codec made its debut with Tiger and, having checked out some high-definition videos in it, it really is stunning. The 1080p Batman Begins one is gorgeous, plays smoothly on my 1.2GHz iBook G4, and isn’t excessively huge. I can’t wait for all trailers to be shown in it.

I’ll be playing around with this for a while to see if anything else comes to light, but it seems like it’s well worth the £50 it cost me. Longhorn has a lot to live up to, especially when it’s got mostly the same stuff over a year later.

General

What A Week

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The number of assessments that I’m supposed to submit for the end of the first year (just over a week) has suddenly caught up with me and I was doing fairly well at staying on top of things, but a pretty big hiccup occured yesterday. We were in the studio working on our radio production assignment on voter apathy in the upcoming General Election, which was basically us interviewing people of certain demographics for two minutes. It was on target to wrap at noon when we’d have to vacate the studio so that we could submit it then or today (due date).

At 11:40 in comes the tutor to check on our progress, who listens to it and tells us that it’s unusable and a guaranteed fail if we submit it in its current form because the assignment can’t just be vox pops.

Shit.

We had to pretty much redo our project in less than 24 hours. Grabbing a MiniDisc recorder, finding an “expert” to interview (the president of our student union – he must know about student apathy, right?), and recording some generic links to patch together what we could use from the old piece and the new one was done in record time. After grabbing the audio from the MD it went onto my USB drive and I bombed it home to edit it.

I use a Mac so I don’t have access to Cool Edit/Adobe Audition which we use in the studeo (hopefully the Adobe purchase means that Audition 2 will get a Mac release) but the developers of Audacity really saved me. It took me four hours to put together something fairly decent so I got to know the program pretty well and it really is a great piece of work. This is why open source is important – I would have been screwed if the only software was the £200 Adobe Audition, but because of enthusiast developers there’s a perfectly good completely free alternative.

Anyway, my copy of Mac OS X Tiger is listed as “out for delivery” on the TNT tracking site so assuming it does arrive today I’ll post some impressions when I have it installed and have had time to play with it.

Movies & TV

Kevin Smith

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For anyone who’s interested in him and his work, Kevin Smith now has a blog. It’s not so much his musings; it’s more of a journal that intentionally goes into meticulous detail about everything that happens in every day of his life, achieving an interesting dichotomy of being prosaic enough to live up to the title but also making me wonder how anyone who goes on CNN, meets Zach Braff, and appears on The Tonight Show within the space of four days can consider their life boring.

He also uses WordPress. All the good ones do.