It was working BEFORE we moved...

We have a 3KVA uninterruptible power supply that keeps my server rack running.  It was working fine before we moved, running off a dedicated NEMA L5-30 outlet connected to a 30A breaker that I'd wired into the breaker panel.  Yesterday, I finally got around to wiring in a similar 30A dedicated UPS outlet here, checked with a meter to make certain I had correct voltage and polarity, and plugged the UPS into it to charge.

The UPS powered on with a rather disconcerting bang, charged apparently normally for a while, then shut itself down complaining of unbalanced load.  It has subsequently refused to pass its power-on self-test, complaining about the same unbalanced load, whether there is a load connected to its outputs or not.

It goes without saying that this is most annoying.  While we do technically have the money to replace it with a reconditioned UPS (about $550) or have this one reconditioned ($430), I'd really rather keep that money in the bank in case we need it for a real emergency or for, say, heat.

Spores

C|Net reports EA is planning to release its upcoming game Spore simultaneously on the Mac and PC in 2008.  Their "secret weapon":  A virtualization "wrapper" from TransGaming Technologies.

According to David McCombe, director of technical design for EA's strategic platforms group, TransGaming's technology effectively creates a "wrapper" that goes around a piece of software developed for the PC, allowing it to run on a Mac.

"The technology wrapper goes around (the software), and traps the (code) calls native to the Windows environment, and converts them to the correct calls for Mac," McCombe said.  "It's not a complete code rewrite.  It's more wrapper technology with some customer work."

That means, for example, that when a piece of software, in this case, Spore, wants to do a graphics call to DirectX, TransGaming's software translates the call so that it looks instead to the Mac graphics library.

Yeah, if this is what it sounds like, STI's patents on that technology ought to be expiring right around now.  Assuming, of course, that TransGaming's technology is a "link against our libraries and get native code" solution, not a "run inside our wrapper and get a mini virtual machine" solution.