More time awasting

I've clearly been a time-pig today. Wholesale industrial pollution. Spent the night not installing OS/X on PearPC, and the day installing. Yup. Just installing. VSIP SDK, .Net 3.0 and the Windows SDK, Erlang, trying to get the Mac Mini hooked up to the HDTV. The Windows SDK 3.0 RC1 install was the largest time sink of them all - the default downloadables are small installers that theoretically set you up to stream down just the content you need. Practically, the installation proceeds dreadfully slowly only to hang about midways (It's trying and failing to download the SDK samples). To anyone planning on installing the SDK, I heartily suggest to download the DVD image (with the nifty mount-the-image-as-a-drive program). Download + install < 1h, no hitches. The second biggest consumer of cycles badly in need of being better invested was the attempt to hitch my mac mini to the HDTV. The DVI out would just not produce a signal that the TV could pick up on. Connecting the TV to the laptops DVI out worked (it worked. It didn't work fine - the resolutions wouldn't quite come together, but it worked). Fun fact of the day - most TVs map RGB component values from 16 to 235 to the full spectrum of brightness, leading to typical computer generated pictures (which use the full 0 to 255 range) to be much too bright.

In conclusion: my name is 'Occasionally rabid Programmer', and I am a compulsive installer.