Ask Different Chat

bmike

03:23

Happy belated birthday to @VxJasonxV - may all your updates go flawlessly this year!

Also @Joel is kicking some serious tagging and editing behind this evening. It's great to see you stop by and leave things better for the visit :-)

VxJasonxV

Yeah, I was noticing that earlier.

@bmike Thanks a lot!

Per-site newsletters, eh? Seems a bit... "old school".

Nathan

03:46

2

Q: Better titles for questions?

As an experiment, I went through a couple of dozen popular questions and attempted to edit the titles without changing their meaning too much. The goal was: Convert titles to a complete question, not just a fragment of one Make sure that all titles consisted of 100% grammatical U.S. English Ca...

discussion

It's a noble idea; I'm gonna try to continue in that line.

VxJasonxV

08:03

So true!

Oh god. The alt-text is even better.

ManjotSingh

08:18

Anyone has an idea of FPS game in iOS?

VxJasonxV

there are many already

(I'm gathering a link, one moment.)

ngmoco has a series of games called Eliminate (App Store Link) that is a realtime multiplayer FPS.

Marathon also came out recently, though I don't know if that's a realtime FPS or a turn-based FPS/RPG.

ManjotSingh

08:34

I want to make one

bckbck

12:15

15 more minutes to the release of Mac OS X Lion...

bckbck

12:33

hmmm, it ain't appearing on the App Store

:(

Oh yeah. itunes.apple.com/app/os-x-lion/id444303913

ManjotSingh

Can we JB Mac?

bckbck

12:49

@ManjotSingh you can install apps on OS X without the App Store.

this is going to take a long, long time...

ManjotSingh

Mac OS X Lion costs 30$

bckbck

@ManjotSingh and I bought it

ManjotSingh

from Where?

bckbck

@ManjotSingh itunes.apple.com/app/os-x-lion/id444303913

ManjotSingh

How would I get free?

bckbck

13:11

@ManjotSingh through illegally, or when you buy a new Mac

ManjotSingh

No,Not illegally.

bckbck

ooh, new MacBook Air and Mac Mini

Nathan

14:18

"A newer version of this app is already installed on this computer. If you want to replace it with this version, move the existing app to the trash.

Riiiiight.

Nathan

14:34

That's what I get for seeding :P

user30

sigh

user30

70gb left to go on Time Machine

Nathan

You're wise to back up, though.

user30

Yeah, I haven't done it since a few weeks after I bought this

user30

It's kept nagging me though, I just haven't had the time

user30

14:39

So rattled off 150GB the other day, finishing it off now

Nathan

I use Dropbox for my important stuff; I really just have to back up for preferences and hax.

bckbck

15:08

@Nathan hax as in?

Nathan

Hidden prefs, changing app bundle contents, scripts I've made, etc

bckbck

15:31

@Nathan ooh, wow

Nathan

I'm a 1337 haxxorz

user30

8gb to go

user30

15:50

Calculating changes is taking an awful long time

VxJasonxV

16:19

Wooooo

It is a shame there's no "download status" for App Store apps.

user30

I don't think the new Mail is going to be enough to bring me away from Sparrow

VxJasonxV

It will be for me, but that's because I use both.

Mail.app at work, and Sparrow for my Google Accounts.

Nathan

4

Q: How do I find out the status of a large download from the Mac App Store?

I just started downloading OS X Lion, and it's 3.49 GB. This is the extent of the user interface for the download process: Is there a place to see the download progress? Can I pause and/or resume the download?

data-transfer mac-appstore

VxJasonxV

Well color me... something... colored.... .... ..... wrong.

100 megs downloaded.

This is going to be an all day affair. But at least I'll be done by the time I'm out of work!

Nathan

The download speeds on the MAS have been nasty for me.

Pausing and resuming has helped sometimes.

VxJasonxV

16:27

well yeah

thousands of people downloading all at once? yep

Nathan

Not when I was downloading it :)

But it was still using a fraction of my available bandwidth.

VxJasonxV

As long as it's done by the time I'm off, I can go-home, re-incremental backup, and take the plunge!

Nathan

I'm moderating faster than I've ever moderated before.

VxJasonxV

^ wat

no, the progress IS NOT changing.

I've noticed that Apple is very very bad at making a time remaining calculation

143 megs...

paaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaainful

bmike

A lot of people are at a standstill now.

Even ones that went to the apple stores to do the download.

VxJasonxV

16:33

heh. as if that's a surprise

Hello DDoS

user30

Apple should have the infrastructure to handle all the downloads without a hitch

VxJasonxV

nope

James Gifford

They were one of the first big companies to live-stream everything, so they should be fine. (in theory).

bmike

One of the stores in town downloads 40 Mb on normal days from apple servers. It's just going to take time to roll out more content servers if needed. the load balancers are in place to scale as needed

VxJasonxV

They didn't livestream WWDC.

James Gifford

16:35

I'm corrected: Almost everything

bmike

@Nathan And you are doing an AWESOME job at it. The quality is very, very high on the top questions at the moment.

Nathan

@bmike thanks :)

but I'll have to scale back in a moment; my class is starting

VxJasonxV

oh, oh, oh! I have a sliver of blue in the progress bar for the Lion install icon in my dock!

plastic macbook's are now dead?

bmike

@Nathan Typical load balancers will cache your IP for 5 minutes or longer - so if you can pause for a while (or hop onto another public IP) your chances of getting allocated a less busy / newly provisioned server are better.

user30

They stream all the events through Akamai anyway

bmike

16:38

if all the servers are overloaded - BBQ is the only solution.

For anyone insterested in the behind the scenes for the mac app store - start with whois mzstatic.com

VxJasonxV

"And in August, Lion will be available on a USB thumb drive through the Apple Store for $69." - That's interesting. I might have work one of those up for for absolute worst case failure recovery.

user30

I'm not convinced by inverted scrolling either.

user30

I understand the logic behind it, but I think I'm used to the current method too much

VxJasonxV

I think that inverted scrolling makes since on a device, when you push the content. Not so much on a detached mouse/trackpad.

I'll probably leave it at the default, and cry when I use someone else's computer. I'm pretty good at that.

Is it just me, or is there an Optical Illusion in this picture?

Sathya

@Nathan you don't consider Spolsky's question too localized?

Nathan

16:48

No. It still applies even after new models are released.

Brant

17:02

Happy Lion Day, y'all

3

Siracusa's 19-page review is up, make sure you're ready to read it.

user30

That video is hilarious

VxJasonxV

17:49

800 megs and roaring

I mean rolling...

Nathan

18:00

hahahhahhahahhah

VxJasonxV

I still think it's weird that Xcode is bigger than OS X itself. Especially since it ships without SDKs

Nathan

18:19

So xcode is free now?

I wasted $5.... yipee

VxJasonxV

same

Nathan

i opened it... twice, maybe?

never really wrote anything meaningful

VxJasonxV

I've been using it over the last couple of days.

badly, I must say

Nathan

what're you writing?

VxJasonxV

tutorials from the book I'm reading.

Nathan

18:23

ahh

Oreilly did a sale on the 'companion videos' for the book i was reading, so I got those.

VxJasonxV

I've been eyeballing Safari Bookshelf again.

Nathan

it was pretty funny listening to the guy get annoyed at some of the xc4 'features'

VxJasonxV

I wonder if I can convince work to get it :).

Nathan

are they going to buy you Lion too?

VxJasonxV

maybe, but I already paid for it myself.

I may try to convince them to let me pick up a USB key of it next month.

Nathan

18:26

i wish i could get community to stop bumping stuff today

VxJasonxV

I have crossed the 1GB line.

Brant

18:51

What? What'd I miss?

VxJasonxV

Lion

1.36...

Man this had better be done by the time I leave today.

I imagine it will, but... sheesh.

3.74 GB has never before been so exciting.

bmike

@Nathan I feel your pain - I paid $15 for the tour de france streaming app and it went down to $5 the next day. Since when did software become such a volatile commodity?

I will be delighted to not pay for Xcode 4.1 though :-)

I love the lack of progress bar chat performance art piece courtesy of @nathan and @VxJasonxV (can I just call you @Jason?) cl.ly/8ctK/performance_chat_art.png

Nathan

:D

VxJasonxV

19:07

You're more than welcome to call me Jason.

and you can skip the @. It's really obnoxious to read, IMO. Unless I'm not around and you @ me to notify me when I come around again, I hate hate hate the proliferation and annunciation of "at".

Brant

I read a theory that Apple charged for XCode4 (and FaceTime) because of some bizarre corporate accounting law. Let me try digging up the link.

VxJasonxV

Sarbanes-Oxley

They did the same thing when unlocking the 802.11n radio on older macbook's

IIRC the "deferred revenues" as part of their earnings call yesterday mitigates that, and they can now give out upgrades for free.

Brant

Yeah. Actually, now that I remember, I saw the link in here. So you probably all know.

VxJasonxV

I think we talked about it during the WWDC keynote. And I know it's been on the site once or twice.

Brant

6.35Mbit from akamai, not bad. at least for me.

VxJasonxV

19:12

:(

"less than a minute remaining"

Why is Apple so bad at estimating time...

Brant

s/Apple/computers

VxJasonxV

true, kinda. Apple is just nefarious.

I coined the term "an apple minute" back during the Leopard install when I was at "3 minutes remaining" for 20 minutes.

And about a minute remaining for like, 5.

Brant

Maybe they were doing the same thing the windows xp installer did and assume it would take a flat amount of time, but instead estimated low and assumed the hardware would catch up by the time anyone had to reinstall their OS.

"25 minutes remaining... 10 minutes remaining... Done"

VxJasonxV

I think there's a joke or reference in there I should understand, but I don't :(.

Brant

Nah, I did a poor job explaining it.

The XP installer didn't really recalculate its estimates on the fly, it just printed a string at each step with a number microsoft came up with based on the hardware people had at the time.

So when it got to the "configuring network" stage it said "10 minutes left", even though you might be installing onto an SSD and you actually have more like 15 seconds to go.

VxJasonxV

19:21

I don't think I've ever had a computer good enough to notice

Brant

Maybe Apple is just doing the same thing, but assuming people have crazyfast future-drives

VxJasonxV

I'd rather be estimated 10 minutes and take less, than estimate 1 minute, less than a minute, 40 minutes, 7 hours, 1 hour, 30 minutes, less than a minute, 4 hours. (No joke. Watching the app store progress screen is painful.)

Kyle Cronin

usually in OS installs you can pop up the console output to see what it's working on

Window -> (something)

can you do that with Lion?

Nathan

iirc, yeah

Brant

Neat tip, I'll have to try that tonight when I install it.

Nathan

19:22

but they're still downloading

VxJasonxV

I don't recall the menu being available on any OS install after the actual write process starts full-steam. Obviously I know it's there initially.

I've cracked many a Mac with the password utility after booting (painfully) off the DVD.

Nathan

@VxJasonxV I wonder how many people know that you can do that.

Probably most people would be scared if they knew it was there.

VxJasonxV

As many people know you can do anything besides install via the install DVD

Nathan

Disk Utility and Terminal are both on there, which is great.

It's not quite a LiveCD, but getting close.

VxJasonxV

yep

interesting;

::-webkit-scrollbar {
    width: 10px;
}

::-webkit-scrollbar-thumb {
  border-radius: 10px;
  background: #ddd;
}

I was on a site with a custom scrollbar, and it interested me. Sure enough, custom CSS rules. Sexy.

Nathan

19:36

Yeah. Only WebKit and old versions of IE let you do that.

I think there are a few more properties too.

webkit.org/blog/363/styling-scrollbars

VxJasonxV

No -moz-scrollbar-*?

Nathan

don't believe so

VxJasonxV

sad face

1.64GB left, and less than a minute remaining

sighs

Nathan

What's you normal downstream speed?

Brant

Hahah, it's like the old days of IE5

Lime green scrollbars for everyone!

Hey, it works in Chrome. (Not surprising since that post dates from 2009, hmm) I'm totally using this...

Nathan

19:51

@Brant Sounds most lovely! I'm off to create a user style sheet :P

user30

20:05

haven't seen this before, signature capture with Preview

Nathan

@ThomasMcDonald I thought that was a particularly intriguing feature.

The only problem that I had with it was that when two pen lines cross over each other, it thinks there's no line at all there.

Or at least that was my experience with it.

Brant

Great, according to iftop, my iMac at home is uploading the Lion install to CrashPlan as fast as it is downloading it from Akamai.

which is to say, incredibly slowly compared to earlier.

VxJasonxV

whoops :)

user30

@Brant oh, nice. Apparently I'm downloading at 25kb/s

Brant

Me too!

Oh well, I won't be home for another 4 hours.

Nathan

20:15

I wonder if Apple will be trying an App Store only release again until they increase capacity...

Brant

Eh, in two days nobody will care anymore.

user30

Akamai will have no problem with this, I guess it's just Apple being stingy with their bandwidth purchasing.

Nathan

For a company that made so much money last quarter, you'd think they could afford it...

Brant

Does akamai charge for thoroughput or for bytes transferred?

VxJasonxV

likely the former

Brant

20:18

Putting this here for later: # chflags nohidden ~/Library/

2

user30

At the volumes Apple likely do with them, probably throughput, but they're completely opaque with their pricing until you want a quote

VxJasonxV

I suspect I won't need to do that. I think I'll be just fine with force browsing to it

using open in the terminal. Or Command+Shift+g and putting the path in there.

here's hoping, anyways :).

Brant

can you do tab completion and relative paths in that dialog?

I really hope so, although I've never actually tried

Nathan

Yeah, you can

VxJasonxV

tab completion can be a bit obnoxious, because it will autofill, but not suggest completions

But it understands ~, so yay.

oh snap, I didn't know it does relative paths though. SWEET

Nathan

20:28

yep.

./

VxJasonxV

Not even that

I was in my home directory (fresh finder window), and just entered: Library into it. Bam, took me in.

I don't know what the cwd is when no finder window is open, however.

it's not /

Nathan

hmm

~/ mebbe?

Brant

I was thinking, if I'm in some random folder, can I quickly hit ctrl+shift+g and type ../scripts or something like that

it would be nicer than Cmd+Up, scr, Cmd+Down

VxJasonxV

It would? weirdo :P

@Nathan Naw, not ~ either.

Brant

Well, it would be more command-liney.

VxJasonxV

20:39

that does work, sweet

so I had an idea, and with no finder open I went to ../

and it opened my home directory

I wonder where that means I started...

it's in Downloads O_o

or, hmm. maybe not.

oh, it's the desktop!

the default folder is the Desktop, when no finder window is open. Interesting.

I suppose that makes sense, because the finder is the desktop icons too.

So finder window 0 is the desktop...

Nathan

makes sense

VxJasonxV

yep

I press enter too often :/.

Nathan

chat does a good job stripping returns

VxJasonxV

blocking, not so much stripping...

user30

Shift-enter is your friend

VxJasonxV

20:48

yeah, I know.

It's more the fact that I have continuing thoughts well after my muscle memory to submit kicks in.

user30

Up key then?

VxJasonxV

Could do that.

Nathan

@ThomasMcDonald whoa! never knew that worked.

i always just clicked edit

VxJasonxV

you are a mouse-driven person

Brant

@ThomasMcDonald Multiline chat messages aren't parsed for markdown though. :(

Nathan

20:50

ahh, irony

0

Q: Reopening closed Lion questions

Possible Duplicate: What should we do with closed questions about pre-release/beta software after the software has been released? It looks like there are a bunch of Lion questions which were closed before Lion was officially shipping. Should we reopen these now?

discussion lion

VxJasonxV

heh

Nathan

i hope i didn't offend him or anything....

VxJasonxV

@Brant THAT'S what the problem is?! Oh crimeny. Do you know why that is?

Funnier, given Jeff was in the orig. post 5 days ago.

Brant

I complained about it a while back and was told it was because multi-line messages are usually blobs of pasted text from elsewhere.

VxJasonxV

No, Jeff isn't Joel, and they don't know everything the other does. But still.

@Brant That's a bunch of crap. I'm going to go complain on meta.so :P.

Nathan

20:54

no telepathic link???

VxJasonxV

I have a really bad feeling that Lion isn't going to be done before I leave. I've been stuck at 1.80 for some time.

Brant

in Chat feedback, Mar 31 at 16:49, by Rebecca Chernoff

A multi-line message is assumed to be a block of something you're pasting in. Like code perhaps. And that shouldn't be parsed by markdown.

Grar! /blame @rchern

VxJasonxV

But there's an expression for block text in markdown, they've even accentuated it by adding the "fixed font" button in chat.

Brant

Chat has buttons?

VxJasonxV

Send, upload..., and clipboard. And if you do paste multi-line text, well...

A WILD 'FIXED FONT' APPEARED! Quick, choose a favimon to capture it. [/nerd]

Brant

21:01

Oh, you're using the userscript

VxJasonxV

oh, that's where it's from?

well. poo

Brant

I actually checked to see if they added a toolbar and I didn't see it because I was using the userscript

but it turns out I'm not

VxJasonxV

Has iTunes been absurdly flaky for anyone else lately?

In context of buying/updating apps, specifically.

Brant

iTunes is always absurdly flaky for me.

VxJasonxV

:P.

Brant

21:07

Especially when it comes to syncing iThings.

Then again, I am running the beta...

Hmm, the white MacBook is being discontinued... I wonder if that makes mine a collector's item.

Nathan

sellyourmac.com dropped their quote on my black one by ~$40

Brant

Oh well.

VxJasonxV

I haven't had sync issues for some time.

I recently switched to sync'ing by playlist, rather than checked/unchecked songs.

so now iTunes stores a LOT more music.

Kyle Cronin

21:27

just got a Spotify account

having trouble figuring out exactly what I can do with it

is there any use for the iOS client without a premium account?

Nathan

@KyleCronin itunes.apple.com/us/app/spotify/id324684580?mt=8

doesn't need premium, right?

Kyle Cronin

I downloaded it

but apparently streaming is a "premium" feature

I can sync over files from my Mac, but I can do that anyway with iTunes so I don't see the point

VxJasonxV

The Spotify iOS app is premium (not even unlimited... jerks) only.

Of course, I paid for premium to get in, so, y'know :P.

user30

I stopped using Spotify after they changed their free plan

Nathan

@KyleCronin awww

Kyle Cronin

21:31

@VxJasonxV can you stream from your mac to your iphone over the internet?

VxJasonxV

I haven't been in a position to try.

Kyle Cronin

or is it just streaming from spotify's catalogue?

VxJasonxV

If I'm away, my laptop lid is closed. Thus, sleep.

Nathan

@ThomasMcDonald The US gets the same introductory plan you guys did.

No limits (yet)

user30

@Nathan Unlimited free music/month, no limits on the number of times a song can be played?

Nathan

21:32

yep

user30

@KyleCronin Spotify, unless you download the playlist onto your device

VxJasonxV

Spotify was really fun the other night when I had a friend over.

We were talking music and could continue the conversation while listening to songs we were talking about but didn't have in our libraries. Killer feature.

Kyle Cronin

there is a "sync over 2g/3g option"

VxJasonxV

darnit! I keep seeing crazy eta's, go to screenshot them and it changes to "less than a minute remaining". It's like a Leprechaun....

I was just at 183 days remaining.

user30

Mine's been pretty steady around 11 hours

Nathan

21:34

When I had DSL and was downloading a Steam game, I got a "More than one year" message :P

user30

Yeah, I had that several times last week

Kyle Cronin

once I get around to getting Lion, do you think there will be a problem doing a wipe and install?

as in, I want to zero out my disk and install Lion fresh

Nathan

you'll have to burn a dvd of the lion installer, i assume

Kyle Cronin

or restore it to a USB drive or something I guess

VxJasonxV

22:09

You know, I realized that much of the reason I'm so anxious is that the blue shader in the progress bar is only barely past 1/4 of the way.

I COMPLETELY forgot that the download process is the first half, and the "install" process is the second half. Having said that, I've only downloaded half of it so for :/.

5 hours later, 2 GB downloaded. Uggggggggggggggggh.

Nathan

install took 30mins omm

VxJasonxV

what is omm short for?

Nathan

i'm meditating

Brant

Ommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

Nathan

on my machine

VxJasonxV

22:11

ahh, of course.

bckbck

22:32

does anyone know how to differentiate Lion and Lion GM?

Nathan

i don't think there's a difference

bckbck

'cos I realized that it opened my GM seed

from the downloads folder

and it's not in /Applications

@KyleCronin partition your hard drive and then remove the old partition after you have installed lion

Just to confirm....

what is the version of the App Store 10.7 installer?

VxJasonxV

same as GM

Brant

22:50

Hmm, I wonder if I can kick off the Lion install from a VNC session and then have it ready and waiting for me when I get home.

Or, more appropriately, I wonder if I have the guts to do so.

Brant

23:04

Well, I did it... hopefully I won't get home to find that the installer made my Mac catch fire and burn my condo down, because I'm pretty sure the EULA said Apple isn't liable if that happens.

VxJasonxV

23:40

Interesting, I think the App Store checksums the data you have when you pause/resume.

So I guess I should say, tests the integrity, before resuming.

Sure enough, a large amount of disk reads stops, and then traffic from a "storeagent" process starts going to phobos.apple.com

not to mention that the estimated time starts changing and the downloaded amounts do too

Nathan

All right, I'm joining the party.

Time to start the download for my laptop.

VxJasonxV

1.5GB in 10 minutes from home, flipping amazing

closing this down to backup and install Lion :)

Nathan

50mins

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