super-good!

I was pleased to read that Google is contributing to Wine and was especially happy that they’d been doing so by funding Codeweavers. I’ve worked with Jeremy and other Codeweavers folks through Pixar. They’ve done great work for us, and are incredibly nice people too; they deserve all the good exposure and press they can get from this.

I’ve been keeping up with Wine’s git repository ever since I saw how well it can run The Orange Box, and I’ve been really impressed with the strides Wine has been making. After reading that Photoshop CS2 is now well-supported, I tried it out and it’s been just flawless.

The first thing that I did after seeing my Wacom tablet working perfectly in Photoshop was to download a trial version of Painter X. I love Painter and have always wanted to use it under Linux; though I haven’t been doing much drawing lately, when I was, Painter was the only reason that I was keeping an accursed Windows partition on my machine. Wine ran through the installer just fine, but Painter itself failed to launch.

I don’t blame the failure on Wine, though; I blame it on whomever at Corel made the stupid decision to integrate copy protection into Painter. Now, given that a Google search easily turns up cracks for Painter, this useless copy protection is no doubt lamely justified by Corel as “keeping honest people honest.” All it’s doing for me is stopping a trial version of Painter from running. Corel: Really? Are you feeling nostalgic for the 80’s or something? Why not just include a 5 1/4” floppy disk with bad sectors with Painter? (Ah, memories of Renegade and Maverick!)

I’m willing to bet that Painter would run pretty well if this Protexis bullshit weren’t standing in its way, and it’s a pity that such a fantastic program has to be hobbled by such shortsightedness.

The silver lining for me is that, while searching forums populated by legitimate Painter users who can’t run Painter because of problems with Protexis, I found someone who said they’d just use Artrage instead. Having never heard of Artrage, I grabbed the Starter Edition and, lo and behold, it seems to work as well under Wine as Photoshop does. It seems like a great little program that will serve my drawing needs just fine, so I think I’ll send them some money.

(Corel: see how that works? Don’t treat me like a criminal, if your product is good, I’ll pay for it. I was on the verge of paying a healthy chunk of change for Painter X, and I’m really glad I didn’t.)

I’ve changed hosting again. I don’t have any specific complaints about Steelpixel, though it seems that the IP of my machine here at work was blacklisted from reaching my hosted server. Also, not having direct control of the machine was fairly annoying, so I’m now using a virtual host through Slicehost.

I like how Slicehost lets you pick your favorite distro and it images it for you in a few minutes. Slick!

Goodbye, SCO.

This was a pleasant surprise on a lazy vacation morning. I’ll raise a glass to their failure at 5:00 gin-and-tonic time.

A few more spots opened up in the Amazon EC2 beta program yesterday and I grabbed one of them. I spent a couple of hours playing with it while the other nerds still around at work were literally crying out with excitement over their new iPhones (which are indeed amazing).

I went through the tutorials and then, with a helpful blog post and script I put together a Fedora 7 machine image. One slight change I made to Carson’s script was to point the yum configuration to a loopback-mounted F7 DVD ISO. This was especially easy because Red Hat set up the DVD as a prepared yum repository, so there was no need to copy the DVD’s files and run createrepo on them.

Building the image this way was really fast, and uploading the resulting bundle was fast too (thanks to the speed of Pixar’s network connection in the off hours).

I have to say that I was genuinely excited when I first saw that EC2 had booted my image and assigned it an address. The root prompt that I logged into was no different than any others I’d seen, but knowing what was behind it set my nerd thoughts racing.

At first it seemed to me that this would be the perfect way to host my wee blog and source repositories. SteelPixel is fine so far, but for some reason it’s taken a dislike to my desktop machine at work, dropping all of its packets. All of my other machines work without trouble. That tiny annoyance was spurring my hopes that EC2 would become the cheap, nimble host of my nerdly dreams—and then I did the math. Running one EC2 instance for a month would wind up costing more than $70. Poop!

EC2 still has tons of potential, though, and I’m looking forward to poking at it more. All of these cheap new technologies (from Amazon and elsewhere, especially ZFS from Sun) are making it an exciting time to be a big nerd.