I've heard the endless talk surrounding this gaming phenomenon called World of Warcraft for some time now, but I'd just blown it off before. That is until a friend started talking about it and I started asking questions. Being a D&D player in my childhood, I should have known better than to expose myself to this, but in the end curiosity got the better of me.

I'm not going to bore you with a long explanation of what it is. In brief WoW is a massive multiplayer online game. You create and build a character and venture out on quests. The interesting thing is that you play in realms with thousands of other people. You can help each other or fight each other and it's just plain addictive.

The really appealing part of the game is that you create your own character and then you live with that character for months, even years. Right now level 70 is the pinnacle of where you can get and it takes hundreds of hours of playing to get there. I've been playing for about a month now and I've just hit level 38. With every level up, it's a little harder to reach the next, so me being this far after a month doesn't mean I'll hit 70 in another.

I'll admit, this isn't a particularly interesting post to most of you, but for those of you involved in WoW, I may post my character name in the future. Right now I'm a little hesitant to open myself up to a lengthy friends list. I'll continue to write about this for all of you uber nerds out there.

I'd like to think I'm completely over this debate of what is better, OS X or Windows, and for the most part I am. However, when I came across this article today, I was driven to respond. I find it to be one of the worst posts ever written in terms of accuracy and common sense. Ugh, and now I have to take his claims point by point and respond.

Reason #1: Vista runs more software
This always makes me laugh a little until I pee. Even if this were true and even if this were provable, what benefit would there be when both platforms already run so many apps? Does the user really care if they can choose between 950,000 or 1.2 million available applications? "Oh, fuck that Mac shit, I think my killer app is going to fall in those extra 300,000 shareware apps that were made for Windows 95 in the early 90's." First off, with the built in X11, Macs can run a huge number of Linux apps that Windows can't touch. Then of course there are the Mac only apps and the fact that you can run Windows apps by paying $79 for Fusion or Parallels. That's "if" your company runs some Visual Basic app made by a kid fresh out of trade school.

The truth is, most of the apps we rely on are on both platforms or have equivalents that match nearly every feature. Think about it, video editing, graphic design, audio production, web development, email, productivity, etc... It's all pretty much the same on both platforms. Even though I believe there are better quality options for the Mac, that's just an opinion.

Reason #2: Vista is safer
Absolute lunacy. Preston uses a recent hacking challenge to support this claim. But the details of that challenge don't really represent anything scientific. In fact, if you look at the challenge, they eased restrictions on day 2 and the first person to sit down at the first computer was at a MacBook Air. He hacked it in a few minutes and no one else attempted any hacks on the other systems after that because the contest was over. So we have no idea what would have happened with the other systems. Preston then sites a statement by a security expert who mentions 10.4. Which of course is an older version of OS X. Now I don't know if 10.5 is more secure or not, but the point is that his sources are hardly thorough on the matter.

The most important thing to bring up here is not even mentioned by Preston. His claim is that Vista is safer. But in the real world, that's fatually untrue. Blame market share, blame anything you want, but it is a fact that you are "safer" running OS X than it is running Vista in the real world. Period. I've seen arguments on both sides saying "Oh, but Vista is actually more secure" or "OS X is actually inherently more security focused because of its Unix core" etc... None of that matters. What makes an OS "safe" is how likely you are to have your machine infected or compromised while you use it. There's no doubt that Vista is less safe than OS X in actual use.

Reason #3: It's the money, stupid
Oh boy, the worst of all the arguments anyone can make against a Mac. Instead of regurgitating ramblings from my past, I'll simply defer to this very thorough article I wrote on Zerologik a while back. It outlines two very thorough examples over nearly a year that prove this statement is a misrepresentation of the facts. ( Mac Haters )

Reason #4: The Mac is closed; Vista is open
This point is all about building your own computer and putting Vista on it. Why is an OS running on anything better than one running on hardware it was made for? This is all about preference and Apple has never tried to or claimed to serve this kind of user. If you want to build a computer and put your own OS on it. Use Linux or Windows, definitely. This comes with its own set of problems though. Because Vista tries to support so much hardware, drivers are often poorly written and used to be the cause of most BSOD situations. That's certainly been reduced since MS got smart about catching those things and making driver requirements strict, but I prefer having the OS maker control the drivers too. Don't get me wrong, I see the argument for either, but it really is just preference, nothing more. There's nothing inherently better in either approach. Just a series of tradeoffs.

Reason #5: Two words -- Steve Jobs
What kind of reason is this? Does Steve show up at my house with my Mac and slap me in the face? Preston's point here is that Steve is vindictive and sues people. Uh, have you heard of Microsoft? There was a whole scandal among developers (which I am) where Microsoft sued a dev who made an extension to their Visual Studio software. The guy used their free version to make the patch and MS claimed that was impossible and that he made a free patch with paid software which was a violation. The dev then proved that he did what he said he did (all online) and MS sued him anyway. Look, these are corporations. They sue. They suck. I don't buy Apple products because I drank the Kool Aid. I buy them because they work better.

If you're happy with your PC, keep it. I don't give a shit. And if you're buying anything because of the spokesperson or the "cool factor" then you're an idiot. I don't do that, and most of the people I know who work on Macs don't either. I can site very specific cases where Macs work better for me than a PC. That's all I need.

Hopefully this puts the issue to rest once and for all? Oh who am I kidding.

Okay, I have returned. I'm not sure how many of you are still around after such a long hiatus, but I'm here anyway. I took a lot of time off to find another company name to replace Timberfish. I wanted something fresh that had some meaning and that represented me as an artist, but nothing seem to fit the bill. Until I heard some words of wisdom from both Marc Hershon (who was helping me rebrand) and another friend.

The basic message was that everything I'm looking for already exists in the Timberfish brand. The name didn't have meaning when I created it about 8 years ago, but it has grown to become a brand of its own. There's also something kind of nice in knowing that Timberfish has no real meaning at all. It's a completely unique word that has been forged into meaning.

So blah, blah, blah. The end result is that I've decided to stay with Timberfish and continue to build around it. So if you're still around, you'll be hearing a lot more from me and thank you for sticking. Or maybe I'm thanking you for not clearing out your old feeds that don't update. Either way.

It's time for a huge sweeping change to... well, sweep through my life. It's not that my life is bad by any means, but just like a good application or the first draft of a script, you have to upgrade every now and then. I've had a 3 month stint of chaos with all of my projects. Now that a few of those things have come to a close it's time to re-evaluate how I'm spending my time and make some changes. And they're going to be big.

First of all, Timberfish as you know it will be gone. I'll keep the domain name because so many things are tied to it that are too hard to change, but I won't use the identity Timberfish any longer. Right now I'm working with Marc Hershon of Simmer Branding Studio to come up with a new name to act as my umbrella identity. Basically I want a unified name/brand to represent my philosophies about creating. Whatever this name ends up being, it will replace Timberfish as the outward facing identity that I'll use from this point on.

Poor old Timberfish will cease to exist. That's the biggest change as I'll be converting everything over to this new mystery name. Here's a list of some other things I have planned...

• Using the GTD approach to email and consolidating all emails into one Inbox
• Creating a process to manage all my incoming taks and appointments
• Having my apartment cleaned and getting new furniture
• Making room in my daily routine for exercise and healthier living
• Putting aside time again for ZeroLogik
• Focusing on improving Fries on the Side and taking that to a new level
• Signing with a new agency to represent me as an actor

It's a lot of change and it'll take some time, but I think it's worth it. After I'm done, I'll have a life that offers many new features and improves on the old life a great deal, hence the 2.0 major version upgrade. This will be my last post on the official Timberfish.com. I hope you continue to read my ramblings when I move over to the new name. I'm looking forward to some serious change.

Big news today as Steve Jobs announced that Safari (the default Mac browser) is now available on Windows. Yet another Apple announcement that I didn't see coming. At first I was surprised, but I can't say I cared all that much. I don't use Windows much anymore except to test my projects in IE7, and I already have Safari on my Mac of course. Then as I started reading people's reactions to the news, I started having more opinions.

I understand that we live in an internet age and people with little to no information will spout off just to watch themselves type (not me of course), but some of the things I hear are so entertaining. The best place to find a good range of comments is on Digg (see the post yourself). There were a few that stood out and represented many voices.

I'd call it an Alpha, instead of Beta. It behaved very erratically while I've used it.

I wonder if this person knows the meaning of Alpha vs Beta. Most Alphas mean they're adding features, while Betas are typically feature-complete and trying to work on bugs. Hence erratic behavior, because Beta means pre-release, which this most certainly is. Look back at the IE7 betas or Firefox betas. People love to get "testing" software and complain up and down. The purpose of releasing these publicly is to let "enthusiasts" and "developers" test the software and report bugs, not post blogs about how crappy the software is. I'll say it again, this is PRE release software.

Regardless of that, this will really be a good way to see how "Secure" Mac products really are...

Uh oh, here we go. Ammunition for the wanna be programmer to spout misinformation and believe he has fact backing him up. God forbid a virus or malware will infect someone through Safari on Windows - then of course it must be the browser. Software can't be more secure than the OS it runs on ladies and gentlemen. While Firefox is inherently better off than IE from the mere lack of ActiveX holes, it's still less secure than its Mac counterpart because of the Windows APIs it runs on. A lot of the security holes are "related" to the OS, so let's not make sweeping judgements about the Mac OS based on software Apple ports to Windows, shall we?

(User tells Apple to...) Design and code to Windows standards for interfaces.

Why? I mean they have the three basic Window buttons along the top in the same place, so now why would Apple want to just make a Windows app and give the user no taste of what life may be like on a Mac? I think the point here is to let Windows users get a feel for what a Mac app could be like. Whether they like it or not is subjective, but the point is not to make an app that looks like IE with a different engine inside. Let's lock Firefox out of being skinnable why don't we?

I have 3 basic tabs open, one being this page and no other digg pages yet it's using close to 200MB's of RAM... for what?!?

The perfect example of someone thinking they know something while really being completely in the dark. The KHTML engine focuses on speed. To do that, it caches everything it can into RAM. This means that it has a large memory footprint and performs amazingly well. It's a tradeoff, but not a big one. Just because an app uses a lot of RAM doesn't make it evil. I guarantee that it's not using any RAM that other apps are trying to use. This is where something called "memory management" comes into play. If you have nothing else competing for that RAM, then why not eat it up so it can perform well? This is by design. But if you've got some idea stuck in your head telling you that a good app has a tiny memory footprint, then by all means move on. I hear Lynx calling your name. By the way, Firefox has similar priorities, hence it using a lot of memory while in use and this is what makes these browsers perform better than IE on the whole.

I have Vista running via Prallels and so I decided to install the Safari beta there to try it out. I'll say one thing, it launches and loads pages notably faster than IE and Firefox. So at least those claims seem to be accurate. I'm curious to see how Safari turns out when it goes gold. Right now I see features in each browser that I like better than the others, so there's no clear winner on Windows or Mac. I also downloaded Safari 3.0 Beta for the Mac and it's "much" faster than the old version. Odd thing though... no unified interface. Isn't that odd? The Windows version gets it, but not the Mac one? I know, just beta, but so is the Windows version. Oh well, I'll just let SafariStand do the unifying and enjoy the engine improvements. Oh, and the inline search is very well done. It's the little things.

Carry on.

Sun Microsystems' chief executive Jonathan Schwartz announced (intentionally or not) that the next version of OS X (10.5) will be sitting on the ZFS file system, which was developed by Sun. I've heard rumors of this for several months now, but I honestly didn't believe they could be true. Moving an OS onto another (completely different) file system is no small thing. Microsoft tried to move from NTFS to an advanced relational database file system known as WinFS and failed miserably. In fact, it was one of the huge "features" that was supposed to make Vista the OS to have and it simply went away in favor of keeping the antiquated NTFS.

But in true Apple fashion, they will apparently pull off that feat and release Leopard in October, complete with the ZFS move. But what's so special about ZFS anyway? The list of advantages is quite impressive. It's hard to explain each one (I don't even understand some of them) but the ones I do get are here:

• Self-healing file system. Each write operation uses a checksum to ensure that there's no data corruption. Claims indicate that this prevents all data corruption unless the hard drive is physically damaged in some extreme ways. If corruption occurs, the file system auto heals itself. No need to scan your drives for errors or for you to buy expensive disk repair software in case of corruption. Wow!
• As the world's first 128-bit file system, ZFS offers 16 billion billion times the capacity of 32- or 64-bit systems.
• ZFS is based on a transactional object model that removes most of the traditional constraints on the order of issuing I/Os, which results in huge performance gains.

After talking with some engineers, I kept hearing the same thing, "This is 20 years beyond most of the major file systems in use today." Since HFS and NTFS are both quite old, this basically just means that ZFS is a modern file system and doesn't suffer from 20 year old technologies.

All in all this is an exciting announcement and will certainly solidify Leopard as the top OS in the consumer market. At least that's where the evidence is pointing right now.

More about the ZFS announcement:
ZFS on Wikipedia

No compelling story or thoughtful viewpoint to share on this one. It's just a really fun photo to interact with. Yeah, that's right. I said interact...

http://www.games4work.com/games/swf/supercoolpic.swf

Lately there's been a lot of talk about web operating systems. EyeOS is the one I hear about most often and it seems they managed to release version 1.0 a couple days ago (whatever that means). After reading their announcement and visiting their web site, I was left with one question lingering in my head; "Why?" The best answer I could find was in a video on their about page that shows the OS in action.

• You can take your life everywhere.
• You can share your files with friends.
• It's all free and open-source.
• They then show someone using the OS.

After watching the video, I then though, "But why?" Their are other players on the field, most notably Google with their rumored GoogleOS, then there's Goowy, Desktop Two, Xin, and YouOS. With all this activity, there must be some compelling arguments for working so hard on such a product. I just can't see them.

I think the work Firefox is doing that will let you take an online application and use it offline is much more useful. I'm able to use a system I'm familiar with and it takes the light-weight sharing aspect, which to me is the only benefit I really see. I mean how powerful can an OS really be when it's running in a web browser which runs on top of another OS? If my browser can do enough to simulate an entire operating system, then let's just cut out the middle-man and make online apps that can run on my browser. Oh wait, we already have that.

Don't get me wrong, these things are pretty cool. But only as a novelty. I don't see any usefulness here. In my tests of EyeOS I couldn't even press the delete button to remove an appointment - instead it defaulted to my browser's use of that key and took me back to my last page.

I remain open to input though. If anyone can convince me why this would be useful or make something in my life actually easier then let's hear it.

On Friday I shot an episode of Monk with Tony Shalhoub and Traylor Howard. This was my second time on the show, the first time being in the episode entitled "Mr. Monk and the Employee of the Month" I shot a little over 2 years ago. Friday' role was quite a bit bigger than my first and equally as fun. The cast and crew were just as friendly and fun as I remember them being the last time.

Then of course Tony and Traylor were great to work with. They're both quite focused and generous actors. And then my fellow co-stars made the long hours fly by. Tim Bagley who plays Harold Krenshaw (Monk's nemesis) was a lot of fun too, even though he only had to lay there while I hold him in my arms (you'll have to see the episode to understand).

We all had a bit of fun with the fact that one of my lines was, "Hang on fella" since the use of the word fella may stand out and feel a little dated these days. It created one of those situations where when the take ran long we just tried to hold it together without laughing.

One of the more exciting parts of the day for me was having Jonathan Collier direct me. He's written a lot for The Simpsons and King of the Hill, two of my favorite shows of all time.

I'm looking back on this post wishing I had some dramatic story to share, but really everyone was calm, professional, and fun. So there you have it. Nothing super exciting, but certainly a highlight for me, working with some great people that I've always been a fan of.

The name of the upcoming episode I'll be on is "Mr. Monk and the Daredevil" so keep an eye out if you want.

I absolutely love looking back 20 years or so and seeing a prediction someone made about what life would be like today. In this old video Apple makes some pretty wild predictions about how we'll talk to our computers using natural speech instead of the old keyboard and mouse. I'll admit that if I saw this back in '87 I'd have believed it was possible. However, reality is rarely as exciting as our visions of the future, so here we are in 2007 and we're not even close to having a computer experience like the this.

It's too bad though, because I think this is exactly how computers should work. But I'd still want my keyboard.