Robert Accettura's
Fun With Wordage

I got my copy of Mac OS X 10.5 earlier this week. Bought it from J&R (via Amazon) since it was $99 + shipping, less than Amazon itself was selling it for. For some reason both of them are able to undercut Apple (even with a corporate discount) which seemed odd. Here’s my rundown of the new OS during the first 24 hours.

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There’s an Apple Event tomorrow. Someone noticed there is a scheduled .Mac outage about the same time, meaning a likely upgrade for those users.

I’m guessing an announcement about pre-orders for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and new iMacs. Possibly a speed bump for Mac Mini’s and some sort of iLife product upgrade.

Apple is said to be wrestling with the idea of allowing third party apps. In reality they are deciding if they should aid developers. I think it’s pretty clear there will be hacks to get third party software on there. The question is if Apple will bless the efforts or not.

Come on Steve… release the SDK and let us have some fun and make your product even more useful. The availability of good software is what has kept the Palm Treo and every Windows Mobile device alive despite Blackberry fever.

It would be an interesting platform for a Mobile XULRunner via Mozilla’s mobile efforts.

Don’t forget. Part of the Mac mini’s success is that it is small enough to embed in all sorts of places. Apple has even taken advantage of that press by putting it on their Mac mini page (lower right “Big Ideas”). Hackable products sell. Just ask Linksys about the WRT54G.

Beautiful tour of Microsoft’s Mac Lab. I think my favorite is the pic of all the Mac Mini’s. Every geek’s dream is to have a hardware collection that vast. I really love how they manage OS versions:

…On each machine we have two volumes: ChangeOS and Mac OS X. The Mac OS X volume is where we install the different versions of the OS. We boot to the ChangeOS volume to free up the Mac OS X volume for modification. When we trigger an automation run we specify the OS version and language. Each machine then reboots to the ChangeOS partition, caches the OS .dmg locally and uses the asr command line tool to restore the image. The tool that does this work is one I wrote (in AppleScript Studio no less!) called Lab Assistant. We have images of the Mac OS from 8.1 all the way up to 10.4.6 in all the languages our products support. …

Very cool stuff. I’d love if they would automate that into a nice little installer, similar to Apple’s new Boot Camp. Very cool stuff indeed.

Last week my private server had some corruption on the system partition. Seems to be related to the system log file from what I can figure out. I’ve got it back up and running, mostly. Though not 100%. If it was running something newer than 10.2 Jaguar, I’d likely be in better shape. Not much work, but because it’s 266MHz, it takes a year to do something as simple as upgrade perl. Despite that, the tough little box is still chugging away. Thanks to partitioning, and putting the drive in an external enclosure and hooking it up to my Mac Mini with Mac OS X 10.4, all user data is intact. That’s really what’s important.

Now today a Windows XP system decides to corrupt itself. Not quite done with evaluating the damage and repairs. I got it to boot, not sure what else is hiding under the murky waters of Windows XP. That’s the goal for tonight.

What did I learn? I really need to get some better backup systems working on these two computers. I’m sick of doing this.

I have my G4 Mac Mini… but now it’s outdated because, it’s now available as a Intel powered Mac Mini. So cool in just about every way, except the Intel Integrated Graphics, which even Apple agrees is junk. I do like the audio in put (which was missing on the G4 version), and support for FrontRow. I wonder how many will be stacking them, so you can swap between the two architectures with a KVM switch.

Also saw a MacBook Pro the other day. Oh so very sexy. Very slick as usual.

Now what I really want to see (and have) is the replacement for the PowerMac. In my dreams it’s quad core, ships with 2GB RAM, dual SATA hard drives, and has a pretty similar design to the current PowerMac line. Oh yea, a 2nd media bay for another drive or accessory. I don’t like having a whole tower and 1 bay.

This is a rather interesting promotion. Think Secret has a decent rundown of what’s in the mystery boxes. These new units fix some really big issues with the mini (faster hard drive, more video ram in particular). That faster hard drive will make a big issue with performance on the mini. It’s a really cool system, I love it. My biggest complaint is 256MB’s of RAM it originally shipped with (now a better 512), and the 4200RPM hard drive.

I’ve been somewhat quiet lately. I haven’t been coding much thanks to my computers all needing parts (hard drive, RAM). I’ve also just been taking some time off (away from the keyboard).

Today I even took out Sim City 2000 and installed it on my Mac mini. First time I touched that in several years. Ran rather well except for traffic not showing up well on the roads. Considering that’s a classic app, and I’m running Mac OS X 10.4, not bad. So much faster than it was a decade ago (I can do 1 year of simulation in about 10 seconds now). Getting it installed was the tricky part. Sim City 2000 came on floppy disks (remember those?) Had to boot up the old Performa, create disk images, and save it to a zip disk. Then use the G3 to convert the disk images to the newer dmg format as OS X Jaguar had no problem with it, but Tiger refused to read them. Then save it to Bender and download on the Mac Mini. That’s right, 4 Mac’s were involved. Thanks to only 1 floppy drive around (Bender has one, but there are no real OS X drivers for such an archaic device). So Sim City stole several hours of my day (damn it’s addicting).

My mac mini right now is my primary system as my laptop is down with a bad hard drive (and still on backorder). Typically my PC handles my mail and basic web browsing. So I was still using Camino 0.8.4 until just tonight when I leaped into nightlies. I’m posting just to give a giant thanks to the Camino team for their amazing work on this browser. The only complaint I have right now is the lack of extensions (and that will remain indefinitely due to it’s design). It’s extremely fast (one bounce to launch), looking extremely good, and even fixed some of the ugly stuff I hated about previous versions (like those uber-ugly tabs). The new design is sleek and just perfect.

So once again thanks to everyone who make Camino what it is. If only some of this performance tuning could be brought to Firefox, and especially Thunderbird (which is extremely slow on my mac mini).

Anyway. It’s pure bliss. If you have a Mac, I’d suggest downloading, “installing” (you Mac guys know how great our “Installs” are), and give it a go.

Ok, so first my Hard Drive goes (my good one). So I order another. Thankfully CDW doesn’t process the order, so when I get back from vacation I need to place the order again (note that sarcasm). So I move my mail and such over to my mac mini, which has so far been my secondary system. I use it for fun. My laptop does the mundane email and other associated BS. My mac mini is like that garaged car you take out on days when you want to enjoy the nice weather and open roads. CDW was initially telling me it would ship by 7/8 or more likely 7/13. Ok, so I should have it by Friday. Wrong. Now were looking at least 7/22.

Now my mac mini is only running 256MB of RAM. For a few days I would have made it work, and then go back to it as a secondary system, less apps running means I can get away with it a bit. Now I need to get this thing going for a longer haul. Best Buy has 512MB for $29! Unfortunately they don’t even sell a 1GB stick for less than $200. Yea, that’s right. So my best bet is Crucial. Still I feel ripped off. $29 for 512MB, or $105 for 1GB. How the heck does that work out? Only having one RAM slot makes the system fit so well on my desktop, but it sucks when it comes to purchasing RAM.

Sigh… so if you’ve noticed I’m not doing much lately, it’s because my computers suck. My Thinkpad is down and out, and my mac mini is struggling to perform and just frustrating me. I think I’ve got to bite the bullet and just cough up $100 so my mini performs better, and wait for a good HD to ship.

I hate this stuff.