The issue started when my macbook pro would just power off after about ten minutes running from battery. I figured the problem was a dead cell in the battery and decided i’d need to buy a replacement in the not too distant future.

A few days later i noticed a slight swelling in the battery which had caused one of the corners of the casing to come unglued. Couple of days after that it had spread to the other side, and was now about 2mm of swelling.

Obviously something had to be done, so i called up Apple. The laptop is well out of warrantee at 2 years old, but this issue just wasn’t right. The telephone support guy explained that they had no policy for the 17″ macbook pro battery (though, apparently if it had been a 15″ they’d have replaced the battery – it got recalled or something). I argued with him a bit. Of course i understand that batteries have finite lifespans, i’m fine with having to replace dying batteries and with MTBF in general – but it’s a different story when the things are inflating dangerously from chemical reactions!

Telephone support guy explained that as far as Apple were concerned the 17″ macbook pro battery was safe, and because of that they wouldn’t replace it. So i got him to agree that if mine DID explode/catch fire apple would be entirely responsible. I felt bad though and didn’t ask for the guys name.

Anyway, i bought a new battery (for £100, sadly) and things were fine. But after about 10 days i noticed that the battery (which was sitting on my desk) was a good bit bigger than it had been when i pulled it out of the laptop!

You know you’re working too hard when you start having an existential crisis over variable variables while sitting in the first class section while zooming across the country in a train, and complaining that your code has become “way too abstract”.

Yeah.

The good news is that i have my collectors edition of Bioshock. Though there was some drama getting it. Since i had the day off work today i asked a friend to collect my copy. The shop enthused to me a few days ago that there would be absolutely no problem with that. But, you’ve guessed it, there was. Some employee didn’t want to hand it over, because my friend did not have a receipt. I had to call them from home to explain that i was the first pre-order. The line started with me, and that in the front of his ringbound pre-order folder he’d find a hand written slip with my name on it (which he did). So, long story short, i got my copy. Six inch big daddy statue and everything.

I haven’t played it yet, because i’ve been forcing myself to work. How’s that for willpower?

In other news, i’m really enjoying a show on The History Channel called Human Weapon and the latest episode airs tonight. Sadly that’s “tonight” in America. It’s already “tomorrow” (01:46) here in Scotland and i’m shattered. I don’t think i can stay up till it hits the torrent sites. Bleh. As you can discover by clicking the link i’ve provided, it’s a martial arts show – a subject i have much interest in.

Oh! My new connection got enabled today. Brand spanking new ADSL2. It’s rated for “up to 24mb” but at the moment i’m getting just over 16.

I spent ages staring at:

Till finally i got desperate and called up and asked for an ETA. I was told “sometime before 9pm”, which was lovely to hear except that i called at mid day, so i had anything up to 9 bloody hours to wait. Thankfully it kicked in just after lunch, and it wasn’t long before i saw:

That’s one point six MEGABYTES a second.

We’ve always suffered from slow connections here in the UK, because we were dominated by one telecoms company. In America there has always been a lot of competition to drive prices down, so people have been used to things like “free local calls” for as long as they can remember. We on the other hand got to enjoy extortionate prices and dial-up internet for wayyy too long. It all began to change when Ofcom (or possibly Oftel at the time) forced British Telecom to give other companies access to it’s telephone exchanges. Other companies could step in and install their own equipment. Offer their customers new exciting things. Provide some much needed competition.

The horror of dial up still lingers in my mind during dark and stormy nights, no matter how much i try to suppress the memories. When MP3s became popular, and we were all stuck on 32kbps or 56kbps modems it was a luxury to download a couple of them. We were so used to the speeds that it was common parlance for us to refer to 1 megabyte of data as “five minutes”, seeing as that was how much time it would take to download. A three megabyte MP3 would have taken fifteen minutes to download. Though i shaved off quite a bit of time because i insisted on using external modems (because internal “software” modems shared your CPU, and could cause a fair bit of slowdown.. or be affected themselves if you were doing something resource intensive like.. playing tomb raider 1) and had a high end ISP.

The point i’m struggling to make is that these recollections are ingrained in me, and it still boggles my mind to think that i can now download in two seconds, something that would’ve taken fifteen minutes when i was in school.

Sick.

When we first had access to DSL in my area i signed us up to an ISP who happily stuck with their unlimited use policy. This was important to me because now that i had ultra fast broadband (512kbps.. yeah) i planned to download everything i had ever desired. We stuck with this company for years, slowly upgrading as the tech was available. Eventually we got to a claimed speed of 8mbps (though in actuality we weren’t getting nearly that much bandwidth), and with that speed bump i learned that the company had changed some things around. Most importantly their policy regarding usage. No longer did you have the luxury of “unlimited”, now things were very much limited. 13 gigabytes of downloads a month before they’d start imposing limits on your account. Thirteen gigabytes a month!! To put that into perspective i just checked my modem stats: The modem has been running for pretty much dead on 12 hours, and in that time i’ve downloaded just over 12 gigabytes.

So we’ve established that my monthly limit was lousy. But that wasn’t the only problem. The ISP also implemented strict traffic shaping. Traffic shaping is the notion of detecting and categorising different types of network use (like web surfing, video use, peer to peer downloads, gaming, etc) and allowing them certain percentages of bandwidth use. Web traffic for example would be given the largest percentage of the network traffic because it’s the most important, but peer to peer downloading would be given the smallest because it’s disruptive to other users and potentially criminal. It’s all well and good on paper, but it is absolutely disgusting to fire up a torrent and discover you’re getting something like 800 BYTES per second. Not megabytes, not even kilobytes.. just bytes. I could fax the data and get a better transfer rate.

To contrast that, here’s the transfer rate i got in bittorrent earlier today:

Yeah. It’s a big difference.

I’m rediscovering what it’s like to have a bit of freedom on the internet. I can download new game demos on my Xbox 360 without feeling guilty. I can watch streaming videos. I can download linux distributions. Freedom.

I got a bit carried away with my ranting here, it’s 02:21 and i really should be sleeping, this was only going to be a tiny quick post. Heh.

Goodnight.

Today the Bioshock pc demo was released, and i urged a colleague of mine here to download and play it. Sadly the PC’s here are your typical dell business machines, nothing fantastic. The end result being that the Bioshock demo ran like hell. You could see that it was supposed to be pretty, you could appreciate the shiny water and the crackling flames. But you couldn’t really move, and that’s kind of important.

If only i had bothered to install bootcamp on my macbook pro..

Yeah, you’ve already guessed what happened next. I backed up my macbook pro, cleared out some space, and started installing bootcamp. Just to install a demo that i’ve completed 4 or 5 times on the xbox360. Not to mention the fact that the game is due out here on Friday, and i’ve preordered the collectors edition!

I started up the bootcamp installer, opted to make a 10GB partition for XP (i was using 6 or 7 gig for my parallels XP install, and that was going fine) and clicked continue.

Bootcamp Partition Error: “Files cannot be moved”

Bugger, wasn’t expecting that.

The installer explained that i needed to “repair” my drive. I’m in the habit of repairing my permissions almost every day, so i instinctively did that… only to get a new error message telling me that there were files bootcamp couldn’t move. The installers suggestion was to back up my entire drive, format, and then pull my backups back over before trying to install bootcamp. No chance!

I thought for a while, what kind of file would cause the problem… My first thought was parallels, perhaps it’s having difficulty with the protected files it uses. So i deleted parallels – to no avail. I got rid of incomplete Bittorrent downloads, and large video files. I got rid of temporary Final Cut files. Nothing.

Then it clicked.

I wasn’t repairing my disc, i was repairing the permissions. So i tried to verify the disk.

Of course, luckily for me you can’t repair the disc you’re currently booted from.. and i didn’t have my OS discs with me to boot from. Woo.

Just as i was about to give up i remembered that booting into safe mode runs fsck.. or something like it anyway. So i did just that (if you ended up here looking for a solution to the problem, you can enter safe mode by pressing shift as soon as you hear the boot chime, and holding it till the rotating “wheel” appears under the apple icon.. it’ll take a while to book into OSX, but one it does you can just restart to get back into OSX normally.). After i was back in the OS i ran Disk Utility again.

Woo!

Woo!

Apparently there are 31 minutes remaining on my XP install.. hopefully things will remain this smooth.

Edit: It went fine. XP is installed.. though i can’t seem to connect to our wireless access point here..