Been reading as much as I can over the last few days to catch up on some of the Centrino news that has hit this week. Can't help wondering what these things will do to Apple's laptop sales, as the lower power consumption (albiet not so great with G4's) was one of the things that helped them differentiate their notebook designs... even if they've pushed it to the point where I'm pretty sure I can smell myself slowly cooking.
posted on March 31, 2003 at 10:41 PMSucks 2 be me...
Just one of those days... and considering I'm banging this out at 5am, it's actually been more than a day. But I'm almost caught up with all the shite, which means a few hours of catching up on non-critical emails, a few hours of sleep and we're back in business.
I guess it wasn't as bad as it could have been, it was all my time wasted, not anyone elses, but damn has it been annoying as hell. Why did it suck? Both my iBook and tiBook just went wacko yesterday morning, with no real apparent cause...
The Powerbook was really my fault, and while I could rant and rave about OSX just having real issues under heavy load or non-ideal conditions it wouldn't really be fair as I've had similar issues with Linux (ie, log files growing over 2gigs would be one).
Basically I was trying to automate a stupid project, and bringing in a whole bunch of files from a remote server using curl (yeah I know, I couldn't have ssh or ftp access), and specifically using a feature of curl which allows you to pull in sequences of url's and files, rather than listing them all by name.
Since there were a bunch of url's and the files had sequential names... and I'd done it before (with good results), I banged it out right quick. Except that in my haste instead of a [01-1000] i ended up using 2 more zeros than needed... and in multiple URL's this translated into 600,000+ files that curl thought it was supposed to get and output to disk.
Now obviously once curl got past the 1000th file, there simply wasn't a file to get... but that doesn't stop curl, no siree bob. Perhaps if I'd typed it differently it would have just errored out, but I was just using the -O operand tacked to the end along with the function that tells curl to rename the files so I'll know where they came from based on the url.
Since it wasnt able to pull in any data, or rather it got an error message from the server, it simply output the files with the tiny amount of garbage (but named correctly, yay curl!) as it was supposed to. The problem is that OSX uses HFS+ as its native file system, and the smallest block you can have with HFS+ is 4k, so even a 100byte file will take up 4k... and with the amount of files it was trying to pull in that translated into ~5.4gigabytes.
Normally this wouldn't be a big deal, my tiBook has a 30 Gigabyte HD, of which I normally only use 50% of. But since I've been away I had a bunch of my MP3's moved onto it, but it still left me with 5 gigs... generally plenty for swapping and whatever I might need to do while I'm gone. The unique situation that came about was that I had photoshop open and working at the time with some large, layered files and it uses its own VM system and was using a large chunk of the left over space for itself... which led to the HD getting full right quick.
I knew I had a problem when I walked by to check on it and saw an OSX error message saying "You are out of memory, close programs or remove files or (insert scary warning)". Considering I hadn't seen something like that since OS9 on the mac, I got a little wigged and quickly checked the space on the HD... it said there was 250 megs, so I figured the error message was just trying to be pre-emptive and no real damage had been done. Closed everything I was working on, identified what had happened and removed the offending files. Everything seemed hunky dory, so I worked for a bit more, then restarted and was going to run fsck.
That's when the shit sort of hit the fan... I knew there was a problem with OSX where, if the OS ran low on disk space, certain system preferences might get reset, such as the download folder for your web browser, etc. But I'd never encountered it, and never heard of it being this bad.
Rebooted, ran fsck, repaired permissions while I was at it... everything was fine. Logged into aqua, and everything was reset to a virgin install of OSX.
Everything.
I wish I was exaggerating, but I'm not. Dock was completely reset. Network preferences were completely reset. All my apps lost their preferences (including registration). I can handle having to re-add my icons to the dock, but how the hell Photoshop, Dreamweaver, even something like Yahoo Messenger or iChat went virgin on me is something I just don't quite understand. Incredibly frustrating to say the least, especially since I don't just carry around my install discs or all of my email server settings.
I was able to get ahold of somoene who could get into mine for me after a few hours and give them to me via the phone, so all was not lost and it was pretty painless, if annoying...
...and then the iBook went apeshit.
Started simply enough, I had it hooked up to a firewire burner and was trying to backup some data. Got some errors about part way through, so I figured it was the media, and tried a few more times... giving the hotel some free coasters. Still wasn't working, so I tried to burn an audio CD through iTunes. Same deal- stalled halfway through. At this point I decided to repair permissions, and it found a bunch of stuff... then rebooted and tried to run fsck. Ran for a second and reported an extent error.
Now I was really annoyed, so I hooked it to the tiBook via firewire in target mode and tried to run disk first aid on it (no crossover cable or diskwarrior available, and I forgot that the tiBook's eth01 interface is auto-sensing). No luck, errored out straight quick.
So I had to copy over all the data, and do a reformat/reinstall on it, which is well, annoying as hell as the connection while not modem speed wasn't exactly speedy. Took forever for the OS install, updates and app installs... this plus the tiBook issues were not how I wanted to spend my evening.
The iBook going wacko just didn't make a lot of sense to me- nothing had happened to trigger it, and I'd just run fsck a few days before and it found no errors. Computer would boot fine, work fine, except for the burning.
Both are working fine for the moment, and I know windows has its own share of issues in the same vein... but damn, personal computers are still borderline mentaly retarded children in the grand scheme of technology.
I just spent time trying to compile Chimera Camino tonight, just for the heck of it, as I wanted to spend some time going through the code and see if I could make a small change here and there that wasn't as simple as modifying a .nib file.
Holy hell, it takes ~2 gigabytes for a compile. Admittedly, a lot isn't the Camino project's fault, as they are building off of the Mozilla code base, but still. That is some massive, massive bloat.
Damn, Slashdot picked this story up and ran with it along with most of the Mac news sites and a whole slew of PC ones. This is at least the 2nd revision of the story, and I don't remember the first getting picked up as readily in the Windows camps... perhaps it's a slow news day. Either way it's really, really bad press for Apple... the only saving grace being that AMD machines weren't included, which in benchmarks I've seen will often beat the P4 on some of the tests by a large margin.
Generally, the comments (both on slashdot and around the web) break down into (paraphrased):
"The tests are loaded against the Mac, because a lot of the apps used don't take advantage of the Mac's dual processors or aren't very optimized for Altivec. So it's a biased, worthless benchmark and not indicative of the mac's speed."
First of all, just be glad the machine in question wasn't a dually-xeon or athlon but rather a single P4.
That said, lets look at the dual processor issue first: The thought here is that the PC is uni-processor, while the mac has two processors, yet for an app to really take advantage of 2 processors it has to be specifically written to do so (threading). This means that you split what your app does into different threads, each of which gets worked on by one of the processors.
For example, if you had a 3D rendering app, one thread (thread A) might handle the interface (where you point and click and stuff gets displayed to the screen) while the other (thread B) might be doing the actual calculations of your 3D model. If it was a single processor machine, thread A might be taking up 10% of your CPU time while thread B takes up 90% of your CPU. If you move to a dually machine, thread A goes to its own processor, leaving thread B to the first... giving you a speedup of ~10%. You wouldn't get quite that much, but I'm trying to keep it simple. Your real gains would be in somehow splitting thread B into separate threads, for example taking each frame that has to be rendered and putting that onto its own processor. Then the speedup might be very dramatic indeed.
However this often either isn't very easily accomplished, due to the calculations that have to be performed not being easily "split" or the time spent to code it not being considered to be cost efficient. For example, many Photoshop/Image filters just can't be split up easily into multiple actions just because of how they work, needing to the the image in its entirety.
Most applications in general just don't take advantage of dual processors, and that's just the way it is- your apps are not magically twice as fast by having them.
Now, the Altivec side of the equation is that the Mac has this really nice SIMD tacked onto its processors which allows it to run certain types of code very, very quickly. SIMD means single instruction, multiple data. The limitations are basically that you don't need double-precision numbers, that you spend the time to write the code, and that the computation you need to do would benefit from SIMD in the first place. If you have something you need to do that is basically calculating the exact same thing in a loop over different data (often pixels) it can be dramatic.
But often it's not, or the limitations of how Altivec works don't make it "precise" enough for the purpose at hand. So in many cases the apps in question just might not be able to use Altivec because it doesn't meet their needs, or they've made the decision that they don't want to put the effort into maintaining different code bases for specific functions. Ie, not all your users may have a G4 processor, so you would have to have multiple code bases just for the mac... and when you might already have two code bases (PC + Mac) you want to keep it as simple as possible.
Don't get me wrong, I really dig dual processor machines... because while multi-tasking and using multiple apps it just makes the whole experience smoother. But they aren't a panacea, and sometimes you just need a really fast processor, not two sort of fast processors. I'm the same way about altivec- it's great if you can use it, but in many cases it either isn't appropriate or the time a developer would need to spend optimizing for it can't be justified for the gains they'd get.
And the bottom line is that this type of benchmark isn't SPEC2000 or something that just measures CPU speed or memory bandwidth: it measures how fast these apps will run on either platform. And if you use those apps for a living, that is a big deal.
"Both platforms are fast enough for anything you might want to do, so which system you use depends on the environment you prefer."
Nyet. You might interpret this from the examples shown, which might be 1:30 vs 1:60, or 1 minute versus two minutes, but you'd be guilty of not seeing the forest for the trees.
For example, if you have a specific function that takes 0.25 seconds on one platform, and 0.5 seconds on another platform, the difference to the user, while 50% slower, won't be a big deal unless you have to do the operation over and over and over.
If you took the same example, but with a much bigger starting point, lets say 10 hours, the first would finish in 5 hours. That's a big deal, and in many cases for those doing video they are dealing times of 1 hour or even 30+.
You can even see this from within something like photoshop... if you're just doing some 72dpi web graphics the difference wouldn't be that pronounced. Start applying massive filters on layered 800 megabyte files in the print world and you'll see it. And before I get "800 megs? What a joke.", it isn't a joke- I used to routinely work with 160-300 meg scans, and know others who work with more every day.
"This is retaliation against Apple for Final Cut Pro."
The thought here is that Adobe is getting into some trouble in some of their core areas, and one of the trouble makers is Apple themselves, and this is their way of pushing back a bit. Back in the day, the mac (or turn-key systems, such as Avids or SGI's) were the machines to use for video editing, and adobe's premiere was the major app along with after effects. WindowsNT went a long way into eating into that market as Apple didn't have a competitive OS at the time, to the point where it's fairly evenly split.
Apple, with Final Cut Pro has gone a long way into destroying premiere as a video editing solution on the Mac, and with Final Cut Express, Apple is eating into any low-end left. In all honesty, I barely even hear Premiere mentioned anymore. It's all Final Cut Pro, or Final Cut Pro + After Effects which is still a big app, but with Apple's purchase of Shake even that market might be going away.
So on the mac, Adobe's video products are endangered due to other offerings, but it isn't so dire on the PC side of the camp, hence they are "pushing" users of their software over to it as Final Cut Pro and other Apple apps only run on Apple's machines.
In all honesty, I'd have to believe that Adobe (and many other developers) would love to see the Mac just die away in some ways: both because Apple makes it a bit difficult when they are competing directly against you, and that having one OS to develop for and support (windows) makes things a lot easier.
"Anyone who isn't living under a technological rock or RDF field knows that PC's have surpassed macs in raw speed for most types of computations quite a bit ago, and this type of thing only nails it home. I hope it pushes Apple to either do something drastic to even the disparity or surpass it sooner rather than later."
Hard to find any fault in that one.
There a bunch of information floating around the web at the moment about Apple's iBooks and Powerbooks having some real reliability issues. Much is referenced, but from what I can gather the majors are: battery issues, dying screens, heat, dying ports, breaking components and big time glitches from within OSX (kernel panics, etc) that perhaps point to the build being shipped not being fully compatible with the new models.
It pretty much matches with my experiences, and is a little depressing. Mac's are considered to be a luxury item, and Jobs' has even compared them to luxury car makers... If the gearshift nob of your neon falls off, well, they have cheap components and you would be pretty annoyed. If the gearshift nob of your jaguar breaks off, you feel a little ripped off.
Some mac users out there poo-poo this type of information, saying things like "Mine works just fine." which is a little short-sighted. I'm in the camp that thinks their obviously real problems that are not helping the platform whatsoever. Then again, I use a lot of mac hardware (and have seen a lot of the issues mentioend above) and try to keep in touch with what's going on with it, not just with mine.
Quite honestly, while I love macs there just isn't a single model I can recommend right now to someone who is interested in the platform and wants something that is fast, reliable and not overly pricey. That disturbs me, and I have a feeling it might show up in Apple's upcoming quarterly figures.
Adobe has an article on their website now, advocating PC's over Mac's for their products, due to the PC having an impressive speed advantage over the Mac's.
You just know they're going to get ~5,000 emails threatening to boycott them, and while I can't fault the benchmarks themselves, especially with the particular applications used, for the life of me I can't imagine why adobe would post it.
Sure, I can see that they might often get asked the question about which platform one should choose by those buying their products... but generally in those types of cases one would be pretty mum, saying things like "Our software works great on both platforms." to avoid pissing either platform's rabid fan base off.
I dunno, I'm still in shock after using the 300MHz iBook running OS9 and Outlook Express a few days ago, compared to my 667 Powerbook sitting right next to it running 10.2.4. I honestly couldn't believe just how fast it was doing the simple things, like opening an email message.
In Outlook for OS9 on a 300MHz machine with 4 megs of VRAM it was instantaneous, by which I mean the message opened and displayed before the enter key had even sprung back. It's far from instantaneous in either Apple's Mail or Entourage in OSX on my 667MHz Powerbook with 16megs of VRAM, to the point where I can't view stuff unless its in the preview pane.
Way to go Apple, taking a computer that is an order of magnitude faster than a model years older, and made it an order of magnitude slower than the older model for simple, basic things, all with one OS update. Heh, so maybe I'm a little biased at the moment...
I dunno, a ton of Apple's professional users are at a major crossroads due to the switch to OSX and the schism it has caused, and maybe companies like Adobe doing this will help accelerate whatever Apple has planned.
I have to admit though I'm honestly worried at this point, as a 1.8GHz PPC 970 just won't cut it, and a dually 1.8GHz machine would just let it help keep up for awhile... not the order of magnitude people need or want. The "If we build it, they will come" mentality Apple is prone just might not be cutting it anymore.
In the past I've been annoyed and pissed off about the speed and component issues with OSX and Apple's hardware, but now I'm just plain worried.
Had this handed to me a few days ago, but just got around to installing and playing with it last night and noticed no weirdness so it's now became my standard. Sorry to hear about Apple closing the beta program, but it's understandable as really, I shouldn't have it, but I'm glad I do.
There are some cool things in this build of Safari that really make my day, namely:
- Noticeable speedups both in tabs, typing in forms and page loading
- Less "hiccups"
- There's an option now to have the tab bar always show: this is cool, as in the last release the page would resize vertically every time you added a tab, and OSX doesn't exactly excel at resizing, and when you went down to one page it resized back.
- Seems to be more stable with a lot of tabs open- I was having stability and redraw problems with the prior version with a bunch of tabs open
- There's an option now to have tabs open in the same window when a new page is requested by another app... very very cool for something like netnewswire.
There are a few things that still throw me with Safari, which are:
- The metal interface is a bit dichotic... You see this in a bunch of other iApps, such as iChat, but in Safari it really grates. What I'm talking about is the fact that while you have a metal interface, the whole thing isn't metal, just most of it. Open up the preferences window, and it's aqua. When you run out of space for tabs, the pop-up is aqua... etc. Just makes it feel dichotic and a bit hacked. This is more of a general UI issue on OSX though, I suppose.
- For the life of me I can't get autofill to work correctly, and wasn't able to in the last build either. I'm wondering if I'm doing something wrong in expecting it to work like other brothers- but I really need it to pick up user/passes to specific sites I have to go into many times a day. Just won't do it. Filling in information from the address book (name, email, etc) seems to work fine, but I can live without that.
- There still seems to be some intermitten weirdness with certain server/script combinations, such as movabletype. Using movabletype as an example, it seems to have gotten faster at displaying certain pages but some just don't work with this build, such as trying to upload an image.
I'm really excited by Safari, it is really shaping up. I wish Camino (a.k.a Chimera) still had the development speed of old in order to have some better competition.
w00t!
Spent most of today installing Jaguar onto a 300MHz tangerine iBook as a favor to a friend, who had been running OS9. She'd been holding off on upgrading until they could get the Office vX suite cheap, and since they were able to pick it up for $5 from their uni and I was in the area, we set to it.
Took a lot longer than I anticipated, even though we had a high speed connection for updates... mostly because of just how slow the CD drive is in that machine, and the speed of the disk and subsystem in general.
Some observations:
- Memorable Design
The toilet-seat iBook design is just much more memorable compared to Apple's current designs, IMHO. There's a feeling of having little aestetics throughout it for the sake of aesthetics, that don't hurt functionality whatsoever (ok, size could be one thing). Just a guess, but the design of this thing will be something people remember 10 years now, like the Blackbird or Wallstreet Powerbooks, whereas the current snow-iBook and iMac will most likely fade from memory. - Forward-thinking components
I honestly don't know what the hell Apple was smoking when they not only said these machines were made for OSX back when they sold them, when you consider the bus/component speed and the resolution. The video card is a joke, as well as the bus speed... The CPU with enough RAM actually isn't too bad for OSX, but the other parts of it just drag down performance. - 800x600
OSX is barely usable at any resolution under 1024x768, and with the iBook's 800x600 resolution, and very poor graphics performance (ie, don't try hiding/unhiding the dock) it makes for a painful experience. There's just so much screen real estate wasted it sort of rubs me the wrong way. Even in the setup screens for OSX, or the preference panes, they actually go off the screen or run under the dock no matter how small it is. Most of Apple's notebooks still ship with very low resolutions compared to PC's, and PC's don't need the resolution nearly as much as Mac users do... Apple's margin's are high enough that it can increase the resolutions to match the PC makers, as it's a bit sad right now. - Standard Formats
Way too much of my time was spent dealing with their legacy email, which was in Outlook Express. It's a good app, but getting anything out out of it in a format that other mail readers on OSX could deal with was an exercise I'm just not in the mood to relate. Note to self- when at all possible, avoid proprietary solutions or formats. They make dealing with legacy data/solutions a bitch. - Severe stability issues are worrisome
Two machines, both running 10.2.4 were connected via a hub for file sharing. Worked like a charm, until everything was done copying to the host machine and I shut down file sharing. Got the standard message "xxx will shut down in xxx minutes" goes fine. Cept the host machine went bonkers- finder hung with 100% usage, so I relaunched it. Hung on relaunch, then hung up the dock and froze the whole screen... i was able to SSH into the machine and kill of processes but it wasn't to helpful considering the GUI had gone all wacko, and all my work was within GUI apps. Not a happy camper. No offense, but a server disconnecting should not hang the client machine... it's not the first time it's happened. - Beer is good
I like wine. I like stimulating conversation. I like languid conversation. I like to partake of them together... but a situation like this calls for Beer. Beer not only makes the sitting around waiting while the HD drones during installation/copying tolerable, but with the right people actually allows it to pass tolerable and become enjoyable. Wouldn't have been with wine- situation called for beer.
Off again tomorrow morning, one more stop and I'm on a flight home... Waiting for a server to update, then catching up on email and then catching up on sleep. I talked to a server admin once who had never actually admin'd a server remotely. Half the servers I work on I've never actually seen... foreign to me.
Articles like this in the press, and the fact that Apple's stock is down while the rest of the market is actually up are giving the feeling that Apple's addition of Al Gore to their board of directors probably isn't what Wall Street was looking for after voting Apple's board as one of, if not the worst boards of a public company.
Seems to be a pretty resounding "WTF?" all around...
Waiting at the airport, plane is delayed. I hate that. If orange alert is this damn annoying, I hope to god I'm back before they impliment red as I've already been searched twice. Stopped by demon dogs on the way, the mood seemed pretty off there.
Have the tibook with me, and should be back early next week with stops in cali, las vegas and texas. Texas is an annoyance, as you can't smoke anywhere in their airport, but they do have those meat kolachi's (sp)?
Looking forward to seeing the old gang again at least.
Derrick Story writes in his blog on oreillynet about USB 2.0 probably not making an appearance on the mac any time soon. I've talked on some lists about this, as I would have thought Apple would have already had it if they were going to any time soon. Some people think this will help boost the firewire market and actually make USB 2.0 against firewire, and that on the basis of merit firewire will stomp all over USB.
Unfortunately merit often has nothing to do with one technology winning over the other, and if you are stuck with the technology that lost you're screwed. This is really, really not a good thing for mac users, or for Apple. Here's why:
USB 1.1 is a decent protocol, but dead slow. It just wasn't really made for a lot of the needs that are out there right now, such as digital cameras or hard drives. Apple has a technology out there called "firewire" which is a very good solution for peripherals that need the faster speeds, but isn't suited for things like mice when you compare it to USB1.1. It's pretty much agreed that firewire is architecturally the better system, yet the vast majority of peripherals are USB-based, not firewire, even when they would be much better served by firewire.
You can boil down the reasons why into: apple scared off adopters early with licensing issues, intel's chipsets make USB practically ubiquitous now so 3rd parties know that users buying their products will almost certainly have USB but not firewire, implementing USB chipsets/licensing is dirt cheap compared to firewire.
Nothing has really changed from the above- USB still has all of those advantages, plus speed approaching firewire and backwards compatibility with USB1.
Firewire will always be a bit faster than USB2, but will USB2 be fast enough? In almost all cases, yeah. First, the mac market is irrelevant. It just doesn't factor into the manufacturer's minds, it's much too small. So we have to look at how the PC user uses peripherals, and what you find is that while Apple's computers have these very tight and un-upgradeable designs compared to PC users.
If a PC user wants to add a hard drive to their box, most often they have extra slots in their mini-atx form factor and just slap one in whereas a mac user has to go out and buy an external firewire hard drive for their iMac. Since a USB1 hard drive is painful to experience due to the speed of the interface, and since mac users often can't add extra internal drives they end up buying firewire drives which just usually aren't necessary for the PC.
So the vast majority of USB2-targeted peripherals will be things like digital cameras, scanners, cd burners, webcams, printers, high-capacity MP3 players and camcorders.
All the items I just mentioned are either constrained by USB1, and need something faster, but don't need the capabilities of firewire and USB2 will do. There are even a bunch of places where firewire was chosen simply because USB1 wasn't fast enough but now will probably switch to USB2...
The market for USB2 drives is exploding- they're pretty much everywhere now, and fairly soon the low and mid-range digital cameras, scanners, burners and printers will be shipping as USB2, not USB1 or firewire. Without USB2 support on the mac, built-in, mac users will be forced to either pay for "mac versions" which are always much more expensive or they'll have to make sure they have compatible drivers and buy external cards.
Since many macs don't have PCI slots or any way to upgrade anymore they'll just end up using USB2 products hooked up to USB1 ports at a fraction of the speed. I can of course see why Apple wants to not push a competitors technology, but it seems to be a case where they've blown it early in the race and they can either try to ride the wave of USB2 and let firewire slip into its niche or go through a long struggle, hurting their users all the way.
There's a transcript of Blair's speech to his government over at the Guardian, and it's worth a read. It's mostly a recap of things everyone knows who have followed the situation, but it's a good primer for those who feel they just don't know enough.
Shitty day here today, rainy and overcast. The one bright spot so far today has been some camio apple's. If you like apple's, and you've never had one... they're yummo.
I did come across this paper regarding using memory errors to attack a virtual machine, which I've added to my list to go through this week. Virtual machines are going to be a very big deal, very very soon.
The sun is shing, the gloom of morning is gone, and David and Kelly had a little girl! Riley, which while it through me at first I now like very much. Just so, so cool. Couldn't happen to better people... just a great day.
Back from the wedding, had a decent time. No major felonies were committed, which is a godsend when you consider some of the participants.
Got asked a lot about my feelings towards the war in Iraq, which was unexpected. Hard to really call it a war- if we take more than 200 causualities in this, it will only be because we would be fighting a pseudo-war and trying to protect as many innocent lives as possible. Think about it- the most logical way to approach the situation would be to bomb the hell out of every single target we encounter- Iraq wants us to have to fight within the cities in order to take a lot of casualities, which is fubar. Logically you would pound the city into dust, then sweep in and pick off the stragglers with special forces, then move in with actual infrantry.
Of course the cost to innocent lives would be attrocious in Iraq, not to mention the political fallout, so we are going to take a large risk when we go into this that we don't have to take if we weren't concerned about civilians. Probably a risk worth taking to be honest.
Suffice to say, I'm actually for the war, if you can call it one, I'm even part of the camp that believes we need to do it without the UN whatsoever. This makes me a war-monger in certain people's eyes, which is fine. To each their own, and while I am equally guilty of typing them, in this case as naive, part of me smiles in appreciation of the fact that they live in a country that has allowed them to be so sheltered and naive.
Perhaps I'll write more about it as time allows, but I will say it's very hard to have a rational conversation about the issue when someone's entire view point is based on emotion.
Wow. This video is surreal. Thanks to Jessica for sending it, as usual. It's so good to see Christen Glover actually getting some work now, especially freaky-deaky stuff that plays on his strengths as a quirky character actor.
I watched his interview on letterman the other night, but was pretty disappointed. It should have been Dave interviewing him, not the guest host. Not for someone who was such an integral part of the original late night letterman lore, right up there with when Letterman was attacked by the monkey. I mean come on, the guy was probably the only late night guest ever to be removed from a show right after almost drop-kicking the host... and they don't have Letterman interview him?
Without that video waiting in my email, it would have been a shitty morning. Didn't get to sleep at 3:30am because of the russian deadline, realized this morning at 6:15am while I'm half awake that I'm out of both ink for the printer and coffee, something that should just shouldn't happen in a righteous world.
Ah well. Odd day for the rest of the day... Heading off to C&H's wedding in MN later this evening. I'm honestly not really looking forward to it too much, I love them both but their families are a touch insane. Don't get me wrong, I like quirky people, you could even say I have a penchant for them as often they're the most entertaining to be around at a function like this. But there's a big difference between quirky and a casual disregard for self-preservation.
Ah well, since the iBook is fubar I'll be bringing the tibook with me, which I'm really not in the mood to do. I dig my tibook, but the iBook is just so much more luggable. At least I'll be able to catch up on some reading both on the train and plane.
I just got turned onto a nifty driver for OSX which allows one to view/access Linux ext2 formatted drives. I've been rsync'ing one of the server drives to a remote server as well as to my home linux machine so I could access the data locally for testing... it's currently in the PC tower, but this way I can just slap it into a firewire case and connect it to the home server and pull off any data I need from it.
Very, very cool.
The new VideoLAN (5.2) blows chunks for me. 5.1a worked extremely well, except for some audio issues with .avi's every once in awhile. 5.2 is supposed to improve sound, but with my G4 I'm not able to hear sound at all anymore, and it locks up all the time. Deleting it's pref's had no effect.
So I've had to regress back to 5.1a, which is working fine is about the best play available for OSX, it really puts Apple's Quicktime Player in it's place when viewing non .mov files.
I've been playing with Whamb 1.1.1 for the last few days, and it's really a nice piece of work. It's a cocoa mp3 player, and they've worked a ton of OSX specific technologies into it such as altivec, rendevous, straight coreaudio hooks, etc.
One of the best reasons for using OSX now for consumers is the integrated iApps that Apple has released, with iTunes being the venerable first. It has a great interface, and no one disputes that.
But it's nothing short of a resource hog, using 15-30%+ of your CPU depending on the options you have enabled and the mac you have. 15-30% of your CPU for playing mp3's is a bit of a joke compared to other platforms which might use 1-3% on average. This isn't that huge of a deal if you're just checking email or browsing the web, but as anyone knows the major content-creation apps for OSX are hogs in their own right and having 30% of your CPU power disappear in exchange for listening to music while you work just sort of sucks.
Whamb won't win any interface awards, although it does come with some very pretty skins. But the best part about it is that in normal use on my powerbook it uses about 7-8% of the CPU, which is less than half of what iTunes averages. Even better, if you hide Whamb while it is playing (apple key + h, or "hide whamb" from the Whamb menu) CPU usage drops to 3.5-5%, a large improvement. I've only noticed two real problems with it so far:
The first is that it allows you to create your own playlists from different folders, and it has a "smart" feature whereby when it starts up it automatically syncs the playlists with the folders. I have a huge CD collection (and 70+ gigabytes of mp3's) which means starting up whamb takes way too long while it syncs the folders.
The second happens whenever I try to change the sound output device from whamb, as doing so causes whamb to crash, although when it relaunches it has picked up the new setting. A crash isn't that big of a deal, but whamb takes so long to sync the folders when it starts up that it really grates. Lots of people aren't switching between headphones and external speakers a bunch throughout the day though so this may not be an issue to them.
So, kudos to the whamb team, I'm looking forward to seeing what comes of it and as soon as those two issues are fixed I'll purchase.
Something seems to be seriously wrong with these things, I've gone through four so far and the machine is barely a year old. Checking through various sites shows that I'm not the only one... this seems to be specifically related to the dual-USB iBooks, as my Powerbook and older iBook haven't had issues.
The older toilet-seat iBook has gotten a new battery, but it was after a few years and I considered it to be tolerable. Ie, here's the current situation. iBook battery stops holding charge after 3 months or so, and only allows something like 15-30 minutes of charge. Go through all trouble-shooting steps, then call Apple. Batteries aren't covered under AppleCare (just the initial, 90 day warranty) but since this is one I've bought new from them they say they'll send out another one. A week and a half later it hasn't showed, so I call back, to be told they are out of them (backordered) and it could be another few days or few weeks.
It really sucks- this isn't some special component, just a stupid battery. How they can be out of batteries for products they have on the shelves of their stores and are actively selling is beyond me. So, for the next few days to the next few weeks, my portable computer is decidedly non-portable again.
I honestly wouldn't recommend these current iBook's to anyone as too many people are having problems... and the 12" powerbook is also having a lot of problems, and the 17" powerbook isn't available yet. Which leaves only current stock of the 15" powerbooks as an apple laptop that has hada bunch of the kinks worked out and it is hotter than hell on your lap and still has the fan issues which can drive me batty on mine (revC 667), although the fan issue is better than the revB 667.
Spent some time today on a coffee break catching up with what changes MT would need to move to mod_perl instead of using the standard /cgi-bin.
Mod_perl is pretty cool, as the way things currently work with a perl script whenever it is called it has to be compiled and then run. Mod_perl allows the MT scripts to be compiled and loaded into memory upon apache load, theoretically offering large benefits when mt is first loaded and run.
This isn't an issue for many scripts, but MT is a bit large and while it's not slow on a server like ru42's if it can be made even faster without large headaches, why not.
So far it looks good, I'm missing 2 specific Perl modules that i'll want to make available server-wide, instead of just installing them into the directory for dynamic load per the instructions, and will spend some more time in the next few days taking a look at the script changes needed. If they aren't too annoying I'll impliment them and see how it goes.
A little birdy was kind enough to drop Safari beta64 on my doorstop last night, and I just got some time to play with it today... Admittedly I haven't spent too much time with it, but what I've seen so far is lovely, I can probably use it for 95% of all my browsing. Some things that are causing problems:
- Tab issues
Tabs are great in Safari, they're very speedy and performance is high while they're loading in the background, unlike say Chimera which will sputter. But I can't get Safari to load new pages into tabs, from say NetNewsWire, or to open a toolbar bookmark in a tab. You can however open up a whole set of toolbar bookmarks into tabs - Autofill issues
I tried to use this, and it's a no go so far. I have about 6 different sites where I am constantly having to type in the password due to having to login/logout multiple times per day. Chimera still rocks for that.
Of course this is a beta, but I hope they get ironed out soon as the other improvements (seems to be faster with SSL sites, tabs, etc.) are great. I'll admit the tabs look a little funky though, sort of busy. I keep finding myself wondering what Safari could have been with an aqua interface.
Oh, now this is cool. Rockstar Games has released their huge hit Grand Theft Auto as a free download... of course it's a Windows-only game, and uses DirectX.
I came across this article today at Wired, which talks about a Major doing intelligence planning in the desert... he claims he has the only one...
Had a really weird dream last night. I usually dream a lot, but almost always they are the same three, and this was completely different...
Mr. Steinberg writes here about just how cheap Apple's xServe Servers are compared to the competition. Unfortunately it reads like a lot of his articles, in that seems as though he is reading straight from the PR sheet and is only hired to generate some pro/con website traffic. Specifically...
Waaaaaay too many people I know are about to have children... just a few months away and four couples will have little bundles of joy. I'm starting to feel like the odd man out. Thinking about getting some sea monkees so I can participate in the conversations between everyone. It was bad enough when everyone started getting married so this should be interesting....
