Part 44 of elf's Apple PowerBook G4 Journal
Apple Exuberance
commentary
Fri Jan 02 19:35:00 2009
A funny thing happened at last month's departmental Christmas
luncheon (which I never attend due to my anti-social
tendencies)— this story is based on hearsay from those
present at the "social" table, who witnessed the events I am about
to describe...
Seated at the "techie" table were my boss (a young guy and a
recent Mac convert) and three other faculty members— two of
which were young guys and both Mac users, while the third was an
old-timer and a PC user. During the course of the luncheon, the
subject of the technical conversations inevitably turned to the
latest phenomenon— the iPhone. At this point, the old-timer
began speaking disparagingly about the device and said that
according to recent surveys, the iPhone was the phone of choice for
"the uneducated" and those unable cope with technology. Everyone at
the table quietly listened to him.
At the end of his monologue, my boss, who is the lead engineer for
the department and capably solves all manners of technical problems
every day, pulls out his iPhone and says, "But I have an iPhone."
At which point rest of the table bursts out laughing, to the
infinite embarrassment of the old timer. (It was at this point that
the "social" table thought that the "techie" table had enough to
drink.) Later, the old-timer paid for my boss' lunch bill.
My boss' conversion to the Apple Gospel and particularily the Book
of Jobs, has heralded his evangelical side. He will talk at length
about the strengths of the iPhone, to any one who will listen (his
HP iPaq is a distant and fading memory). His love of Apple has
reached a point where it was very difficult for me to convince him
to hold-off buying a Mac Mini over the Christmas holidays because
new models were to be released in January. There was disappointment
in his face, that I was making him wait to buy a Mac.
My love of Apple also shows through whenever I meet someone who is
having trouble with their PC as I recently happened upon a
departmental assistant who had brought her Compaq laptop, running
XP, to be re-installed because it was "very slow". When I began my
conversation with, "Have you considered buying a Mac?", (as I
inevitably do) she wondered if Apple was paying me to sell Macs. I
asked her if she'd never used a product that she loved so much that
she wanted her friends to know about it— sadly, she said, she
had not.
The last time she had used a Mac was in college (the OS 9 days)
and she thought that "Macs were used by artists and musicians" and
she believed that the interface was still the "old" interface she
had encountered. I pointed to my boss and said that he was proof
that a person with a complete lack of artistic talent used a
Mac. But, she wasn't convinced. I said she should drop-in to an
Apple store and play with a Mac to see how much they've
changed.
I don't think there is a Mac in her future as a computer isn't as
great a part of her life as it is in ours. When we return to work
next week, I'll ask her if she dropped into an Apple store and
looked at a Mac.
Kernel Panic
oops
Sat Jan 03 19:02:59 2009
mathilde, running Leopard 10.5.5, kernel panicked today
after waking up from sleep. This is notable for its rarity. The
problem was in zmalloc.c according to the problem report which was
duly relayed to Apple.
Time to upgrade to 10.5.6.
"Big Bang Theory" Mac
television
Sat Jan 03 19:13:21 2009
A Mac Classic can by seen in Leonard's closet in one episode of
"Big Bang Theory"; a sticker covers the Apple logo. Next to the
keyboard is a box for a iPod speaker dock (possibly the Logitech
AudioStation Express). In this episode, Penny is going through his
closet trying to find some suitable clothes for him to wear for a
conference presentation. All she can find are his clothes from
high-school.
In subsequent episodes, Leonard was seen finishing a slide
presentation with a Macbook Air (even though he still uses his Dell
XPS at home) and also using an iPhone.
I decided to post this after reading Steven Levy's
article, "25
years of the Mac" in Wired Magazine, where he mentions that he
still has his Mac.
Letter from Jobs
health
Mon Jan 05 09:36:12 2009
Steve Jobs wrote
an open
letter to the Apple community in which he talks about his
health.
Macworld 2009
keynote
Tue Jan 06 13:57:35 2009
Notable points in Schiller's keynote, watched on engadget.com:
- iLife '09 (iPhoto has face recognition, geotagging, new slideshow
themes; iMovie, demoed by Randy Ubillos, has image stabilization,
but still no blue-screen effects; GarageBand has celebrities
teaching musical instruments (guitar, piano), but I don't think the
lessons are free), iWork '09
- Presentation can be controlled via iPhone
- iWork.com (beta) is the iWork '09 suite online
- 17 in. MacBook Pro, 1920 x 1200, antiglare option, 8h of battery
life, battery is sealed and should last 1000 cycles or 5 years,
Core 2 Duo, up to 8GB of RAM (I'll likely get this laptop when I
upgrade to the Canon 5D in a few years).
- iTunes in DRM-free (8M songs today; all 10M by April), two
pricing models.
- iPhone music downloads from iTunes previously limited to wifi, now work over GPRS
No new Mac Minis. That is quite a surprise.
My NIS GID Maps to a Weird Name
NIS
Wed Jan 07 18:37:20 2009
My reliance on the Finder to navigate my homedirectory is
evidenced by the fact that (since upgrading to Leopard, last month)
I have only now noticed that my NIS group-ID maps to something
weird on my Mac. I did an ls -l today and I was
surprised to see...
drwxr-sr-x@ 6 elf com.apple.access_ssh-disabled 4096 Jan 7 18:24 Desktop/
drwxr-sr-x 3 elf com.apple.access_ssh-disabled 512 Sep 1 21:02 Documents/
drwx------ 42 elf com.apple.access_ssh-disabled 1024 Dec 17 17:39 Library/
drwx------@ 4 elf com.apple.access_ssh-disabled 5632 Jan 7 18:34 Mail/
drwxr-sr-x 4 elf com.apple.access_ssh-disabled 512 Mar 22 2007 Music/
drwxr-sr-x 3 elf com.apple.access_ssh-disabled 512 May 9 2007 Pictures/
-rw-r--r-- 1 elf com.apple.access_ssh-disabled 3335651 Apr 28 2005 Simon & Garfunkel - Sounds of Silence - Anji.mp3
I don't know if I should file this as a Leopard bug or whether
there's a new convention where ID numbers less than a treshold are
being used for system stuff. This wasn't a problem with Tiger, but
then I hadn't used the Directory Utility to enable NIS ("Berkeley
flatfile 2.0").
The Return of Steve Jobs To Apple
history
Sun Jan 11 19:51:55 2009
They want me to be some kind of Superman. But I
have no desire to run Apple Computer. I deny it at every turn, but
nobody believes me.
—Steve Jobs, c. 1997
Steve Jobs sold NeXT to Apple Computer on Dec. 20, 1996 for
$430M. The rest
is history.
The Exit of Steve Jobs from Apple
health
Wed Jan 14 18:28:26 2009
Steve Jobs
is on
leave from Apple until June, for health reasons; Tim Cook is
interim CEO. Apple stock dropped to $77 (drop of 10%) in
after-hours trading.
My Canon 50D Review
review photography
Wed Jan 21 17:18:58 2009
I have combined my journal entries to create
a page with a comprehensive
review of the Canon EOS 50D. It including all the custom settings I
have made and also a list of my usability complaints.
It is a work in progress and there will be several addendums as I
continue to use the camera.
Powerbook G4 Officially Obsolete
Wed Feb 04 22:49:15 2009
The Powerbook G4 will be classified as obsolete after March
17. This means that, "Apple will not provide service parts or
documentation for these products and the items cannot be sent in as
Mail-In Repairs to AppleCare Repair Centers." The full list of
other computers is here.
320 GB Seagate FreeAgent Go Drive
backup drive time machine seagate
Sun Feb 08 12:11:43 2009
The 320 GB (287GB
free) Seagate Go FreeAgent
portable drive I ordered from the Apple Store back in January,
arrived on Friday; it was on backorder. It is formatted for MacOS
filesystem, comes with a leatherette travel case, a desktop dock,
FW800, FW400 and USB2.0 cables (greyish-white) and a 5 year
warranty. I like how it "glows" to life and powers down— it's
a nice touch. I'm using it as my Time Machine backup. The silver
drive is the size of the small Moleskine notebook. It takes about
10s to mount. It does not support the SMART drive status.
The first thing I always do with all my external drives is
to sudo rm -rf .Trashes; touch .Trashes which disables
the trash folder on the disk.
I tried an initial speed test of copying my approximately 15GB
iPhoto library from the laptop drive (5400RPM) to the FreeAgent; it
took a bit over 15 minutes.
It was 26% complete after about one hour (15GB of 57GB completed)
and 91% complete in about two hours (52 of 57GB). The level-zero
backup was complete into just over two hours. The top of the drive
was pleasantly warm. The bottom of the drive is a velvety non-slip
plastic.
500GB Verbatim USB2.0/FW Drive
This drive is certainly better than the 500 GB Verbatim USB2.0/FW
drive I bought from Staples which died (made a countinuous clicking
sound) within a few days. I was EXTREMELY fortunate not to
have deleted the EOS 50D photos off my 8GB CF card when I copied
them over to that drive as a backup. It also took about 30s to
mount under Windows, which was unacceptable when my old 55 GB
Lacie, designed by Porsche, takes about 5 seconds. I should note
that I returned the defective drive for a full refund and vowed to
never buy Verbatim drives again.
250GB Verbatim FW Drive
The 250GB drive is still going despite being dragged along the
floor while still attached to my Powerbook via the Firewire cable ,
when my six year old nephew decided he wanted to play a video game
on my laptop.
Michael Beirut and Joel Splosky
design
Tue Feb 10 21:16:06 2009
A
first-person narrative,
in the Sunday Times business section, titled ,"Drawing
Board to the Desktop", from Michael Beirut, who is a partner at
Pentagram, the premiere design firm.
Also, Joel Splosky's office for his company, Fog Creek Software,
is featured on the last page in
the article
titled, "A Software Designer Knows His Office Space, Too".
2009 Oscar Predictions
cinema
Wed Feb 18 21:05:40 2009
Nate Silver crunches numbers and predicts the Oscars.
Ledger, Henson, Rourke, Winslet, Boyle, and Slumdog
(expected to win in all nominated categories from what I've read).
The iPhone in Japan
journalism
Sun Mar 01 08:23:05 2009
It seems Brian X. Chen, a "reporter" at Wired wrote an
article about the iPhone's failure in Japan by mis-quoting people
and using their quotes out of context.
Nobuyuki Hayashi, one of the people mis-quoted, blogged a long
correction to the article. Appleinsider has a summary of the whole thing.
To summarize, despite being limited in features that Japenese use
everyday— auto-debit, train pass— the iPhone is selling
well in Japan.
Google on Charlie Rose
Sat Mar 07 22:56:04 2009
Google
CEO Eric
Schmidt and Google
VP Marissa
Mayer (the person she admires most is Steve Jobs) interviewed
on Charlie Rose.
Wolfram Alpha
ai
Sun Mar 08 14:37:37 2009
Where Google is a system for FINDING things that we as a civilization
collectively
publish, Wolfram Alpha is for ANSWERING questions about
what we as a civilization collectively know. It's the next step in
the distribution of knowledge and intelligence around the world— a
new leap in the intelligence of our collective "Global Brain." And
like any big next-step, Wolfram Alpha works in a new way— it
computes answers instead of just looking them up...
To accomplish this
it uses built-in models of fields of knowledge, complete with data
and algorithms, that represent real-world knowledge.
For example, it contains formal models of much of what we know about
science— massive amounts of data about various physical laws and
properties, as well as data about the physical world.
Unarchiver
bin unpack
Thu Mar 26 18:26:13 2009
To unpack .bin files (like the Adobe Photoshop Elements RAW
support patch) I
found UnArchiver
to be preferable over Stuffit Expander which, although free,
requires one to jump through many hoops (including email
verification) before even downloading it.
Surprises
Wed Apr 22 21:37:57 2009
A few surprises— Oracle bought Sun for $7.4B (the #solaris
topic noted "You are all DBAs now. Please leave your clues at the front desk").
The Sun Enterprise 10K was actually a Cray design that Sun bought when
SGI purchased Cray.
There was a rendering engine called
the Pixar
Image
Computer.
The mute button on my boss' iPhone fell off. He wanted to glue it
back on because he didn't believe me when I told him to go to the
Apple Store and that they would give him a new iPhone. He
eventually relented and was quite surprised when they agreed to
replace his phone and made an appointment for a meeting with an
Apple Genius for tomorrow morning, to check that his problem wasn't
due to the iPhone being immersed in water or dropped.