Rick's World

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A few weeks ago, I bought a nice new Apple Macbook. It is the first laptop that I've owned in probably 5 years or more. My last laptop was an HP laptop with a 1Ghz CPU, and a 20GB hard drive. My new laptop has dual 2.2 Ghz CPUs and a 120GB hard drive. Essentially, I've got 4 times the CPU power and 6 times the storage space in a device that is smaller, lighter, faster and cheaper than that last laptop. You gotta love technology.

Why did I go out and spend all the money on a laptop when I've already got a screaming Mac Pro at home that blows even this laptop away? I'd like to say that I bought it for work or to take notes at conferences (which is true!) but the simple fact is, I bought it because it was a nice toy. The Mac Pro is great for pure power, but for portability it sucks. The Mac Pro is still my primary computer, but this laptop will certainly have it's uses as well. There's something truly cool about parking yourself in the recliner, with a laptop on your lap. You can sit there programming, surfing the web, reading email, etc. while you are watching TV on your big, thumping surround sound system! You don't even feel like your working.

What was the event that finally made me decide to go out and buy this laptop? A few weeks ago, I attended a Microsoft .NET all day show where they discussed various new .NET programming technologies. At the time the only thing I had to take notes with was my little iPod Touch. While the iPod Touch is certainly capable of taking notes and visiting the programming web sites they mention, it is just too slow to type on it. You need a real keyboard and computer for that. I didn't have one. So, the next weekend I took a trip down to the local Apple Store and bought myself one. I bought the midrange Macbook with (at the time) a 2.2Ghz dual core CPU, a 120GB hard drive and 1GB RAM. Of course a few days ago Apple upgraded the equivalent Macbook that I just bought to a 2.4Ghz dual core CPU, a 160 GB hard drive and 2GB RAM. It figures! Oh well. The new Macbook is only slightly faster than this one. Plus I was already planning on upgrading the RAM to 4GB (which I did) so the 2GB doesn't really matter. Plus, I was going to upgrade the hard drive to a 7200 RPM, 200GB hard drive, so the slightly bigger hard drive doesn't make much difference either. I think I'm going to stick with this Macbook. I could just return it and get the newer one, but I doubt I will. It's not worth the effort. I've already upgraded it to 4GB of RAM (more memory than my Mac Pro!) and I'll likely upgrade the hard drive to the 200GB 7200 RPM drive soon.

I've been very impressed with how OS X handles laptops and wireless networking in general, since I bought this laptop. Whenever you do a system upgrade on the laptop, it warns you if you don't have the laptop plugged in. This is a great thing to do because if you run out of battery power while upgrading, you can screw up the operating system to the point that it won't work without reinstalling the operating system.

It also works very well in a networked environment. While I've been using Macs for a couple years now, I've never really done much related to networking them. Yes, I have an old Power PC Mac Mini sitting on my network, but I never really used it for much. It was still very much a single computer network since I used the Mac Pro 99% of the time. Now that I have two Macs that I actually use regularly, it's been a real education. OS X Leopard has a nice feature that shows an icon showing what the actual computer looks like when you browse the network for other computers. In other words, my Macbook looks like a Macbook on the network, my Mini looks like a Mini on the network, and my Mac Pro looks like a Mac Pro on the network! Yes, it's a little thing, but it's yet another one of those nice little OS X touches that I love. Also, I was easily able to set up my Macbook to print to my networked laser printer in the home office. It's really cool to print something and hear the printer in the other room start up! All this with no cables! This Macbook is the first laptop I've ever owned that was truly practical to run completely wireless. My old laptop required a network cable running across the floor of the house, connected to the network, plus a power cable plugged into the wall. Not exactly a portable setup there!

Now that I have this laptop, I can take it to those conferences to take notes, as well as other uses. Right now I'm sitting in the cafe at Whole Foods Market, writing this entire blog wirelessly. Gotta love that! The reason I'm sitting here in Whole Foods writing this, rather than at home is because I just dropped my car off at the Sound Advice store a couple of doors down to get some work done on the stereo. I'm getting some upgrades to the iPod player in my car, which are going to take an hour and a half or so, so I figured I'd walk over here and take advantage of their free WiFi to kill some time. I can easily kill and hour and a half on my Mac if I have access to the Internet! I also brought along my Cocoa programming book in case I want to do some studying of that while I'm here.

I'll be sure to post more blogs about my experiences with this laptop in the future...

*sigh* Even when I have legal copies of Windows XP, it still seems to enjoy aggravating the hell out of me.

I use a Mac Pro at home. I've written in the past about how great it was and how I could run Windows XP in a virtual machine so well that I never needed a separate PC anymore. I'd been running XP happily in the virtual machine for several months, using a legal, registered copy of Windows XP, that I bought just for this purpose. I never had a problem with this setup. A couple of days ago, I decided to take the next step. That's when the fun began.

The next step that I decided to take was to use Boot Camp to install Windows XP on a separate hard drive. This would allow me to reboot into full Windows XP whenever I need to, and have full access to all the computer's resources in XP. VMWare Fusion has the ability to take a BootCamp partition and run it as if it was a virtual machine from inside OS X. I figured this would give me the best of both worlds. I could run full blown Windows in Boot Camp if I needed more power, and I could run that same copy of windows in VMWare Fusion whenever I just needed to do something quickly.

I ran the BootCamp Assistant and was able to easily install Windows XP to the spare hard drive. Leopard's install DVD even contains a program that autoinstalls Windows drivers for all the hardware on the Mac Pro. Windows XP is up and running perfectly. I then spent the rest of the evening reactivating that copy of XP (to replace the one I had activated in the virtual machine), installing updates, installing software etc. I spent hours setting this thing up. It was running perfectly.

Last night I decided to try running the BootCamp partition in VMWare Fusion. Here is where XP ruined my day. XP's activation system is based on doing an inventory of the hardware on your machine. If a lot of hardware changes, it decided you must have changed computers or perhaps installed a second copy on another computer. If it detects too many changes, it deactivates your copy of Windows and gives you three days to reactivate. This is exactly what happened to me when I ran it in BootCamp for the first time. XP's activation system noticed I was running in 'different hardware' now (i.e. VMWare) so it deactivated itself and told me I have to reactivate. This reactivation is a slow, annoying process you need to do over the phone.

So assuming I reactivate XP in VMWare, then it will work. The problem is, as soon as I go back to running it in Boot Camp, it will detect hardware changes again and deactivate itself again! In other words, everytime I switch between running it in Boot Camp and running it in VMWare, I'll have to reactivate it again!

Screw this crap! I'm going back to my VMWare virtual machine I had before and wiping that hard drive! ARGH!

Last week, on October 26th, I met with my friend Dave to buy our copies of Leopard. Not long after we finished installing we started trying out the various features of Leopard to see what was new.

At one point, we got to trying out Apple Mail. This is Apple's email reading program that comes with OS X. I had been using Mozilla Thunderbird for years and was curious about how Apple Mail worked. One feature that I used all the time was Thunderbirds 'View only Unread Mail' setting. This was a setting on the menu that changed it so it only showed the unread mail in your inbox. I liked this setting because I like to keep my old mail around, but after a while, all that old mail starts to 'clutter up' the list and it's hard to find the new email to read.

We loaded Apple Mail, and searched everywhere in the menus for this 'View Unread Only' setting. It was nowhere to be found. This of course made me mad. How could Apple leave out such a common feature that exists in all other email programs? This sucks! Back to Thunderbird for me. But then Dave came up with a solution. Just create a smart folder that displays all the unread mail in your inbox! Suddenly I understood why Apple left off this obvious feature. It wasn't needed and it was a poor approach to the problem. Why waste menu space creating a feature that not everyone is going to use? Why not simply add it as a feature of smart folders. This way, people like me can add the feature, and the rest who don't care about it, never have to see some confusing menu item. Everyone wins.

Nice job Apple. Once again Apple is forcing me to 'think different', but in a good way.

There's been a lot of talk about Leopard lately. This is the new version of OS X that will be released shortly for Apple's Macintosh computers. Apple announced months ago that it would be available in October. They just never said what day in October. Well, now it's October and the rumors all point to October 26th as the release date for it. This date makes sense, since it's the last Friday of the month. This gives them as much time as possible to finish it up and get it out to the stores and still make their October deadline.

The problem is that there's been no official word from Apple on any release date, nor has there been any word on the Apple Developer Connection web site as to the availability of any Release Candidates or a Gold Master. I've been a paid member of the ADC Select program for a few months now. I've had access to all the previous betas of Leopard, but I have yet to see the final version show up on their site. If they are going to release it on October 26th (only 17 days from now), they would have to have it out to the CD duplicating companies a couple weeks early, in order to make up the no doubt millions of copies they are going to need at release time.

I

suspect that Apple has already finished Leopard and is just keeping quiet about it as they prepare all the CDs and packaging and ship them out to the stores. I'm not really that surprised that it's not available on the ADC site. I would expect they are purposely withholding it, so that noone can get their hands on it before the release date. I also wouldn't be surprised if they withheld certain features from the betas that will finally show up in the release version. I just hope that if it does release in the stores on October 26th, that they make it available that same day on the ADC site for all us legal developers to download. I did, after all pay to get a legal copy of the final shipping version of Leopard. I want to have it the same day all the other 'paying' people get it in the stores.

I'm debating whether I will buy a copy in the stores on the day it comes out. I have two Macs at home - a MacPro and an old PowerPC based Mac Mini that I use as a server. The ADC membership entitles you to one copy of Leopard. That would be the copy that goes on my MacPro. That little Mini would need it's own copy, so I may just go out and buy a copy anyway for the Mini. Once I get that copy for the Mini, I'll likely just install it on the MacPro and then upgrade the Mini once my 'official' copy arrives. I've even been toying with the idea of buying my brother's Intel based Mac Mini. He wants to upgrade that to a Macbook Pro, and I may be able to use his old Mini as a small home server. Maybe I'll keep the old PowerPC based MacMini as a testbed for testing Universal binaries on the older PowerPC architecture. If I do this, then I'd need to get the more expensive 'family pack' since I'd be buying two copies of Leopard in addition to my 'free' copy. I'm not sure about this though.

My friend Dave mentioned his experiences with using a Mac Pro - specifically using Windows on the Mac Pro. This got me thinking about my experiences with Windows on a Mac Pro.

While Dave is a pretty recent convert to the Macs, I've been using them nearly exclusively at home for the last two years. For the last two years, I've had two computers at home - a Windows PC and a Powermac (now Mac Pro). They were connected via a KVM so I could easily switch between the two. I liked this setup because I could easily 'multitask' by running both computers at the same time. I could be doing something on Windows and then hit the KVM switch and go back to the Mac, while the Windows machine does it's thing. It was a great setup. It was a horrible, messy 'bowl of spaghetti' behind the desk, but it worked.

I had considered just going with Virtual PC on the Powermac and running Windows in a virtual machine, thereby eliminating the need for a second computer. I even went out and bought a copy of Virtual PC for the Mac and tried it. The problem was, that Virtual PC ran absolutely horribly on the Powermac (a very powerful machine). While Windows did run, it was slow, and some things that I needed did NOT work right. This basically meant that Virtual PC wasn't going to work and I was stuck with the dual computer setup.

The Powermac is a PowerPC based computer. This is the old type of CPUs that Macs used to have before they switched over to Intel CPUs. Apple has pledged to keep supporting PowerPC computers, despite their switch to Intel CPUs and they've done an admirable job at it. That is one reason I was able to continue to happily use my old Powermac for a long time after Intel Macs came out. Most applications continued to work perfectly. The problem was that, with the switch to Intel CPUs, the PowerPC became a second class citizen in the Mac world. 99% of applications worked, but there were some that wouldn't. One of those apps was VMWare.

VMWare is another program that allows you to run Windows in a virtual machine. The problem was, that VMWare only ran on Intel Macs and not on my Powermac. Now, I completely understood why this limitation existed. For most apps, the differences between PowerPC and Intel CPUs are relatively minor because they operate at a very high level. For VMWare, it's quite different. In order to run a virtual machine, it's necessary to emulate the CPU itself. This is a very low level requirement and there's no way to avoid it. I can perfectly understand VMWare's decision not to support PowerPC. It would have required completely rewriting the application, from the ground up in order to support what is essentially a dead CPU platform (at least on the Macs). In order to run VMWare and have a hope of running Windows in a virtual machine again, I'd have to replace the entire Mac - not a cheap proposal.

I fought the urge to do this for over a year. I kept telling myself that my dual computer setup was just fine and it did what I needed. In the back of my mind, though, I knew I was living on 'borrowed time' with that Powermac. I figured that I could easily get another year of good use out of it, but beyond that, more and more apps would start to abandon the PowerPC and I would see my Mac become less and less useful. Finally, I decided it was time to 'move on' and get the Intel based Mac Pro that I'd been eyeing for a long time.

A few weeks ago I bought the Mac Pro. I was easily able to transfer all my files over from the PowerMac without a hitch. It was an amazingly smooth transition. I was now running an operating system on completely different hardware and I couldn't even tell the difference. This is fantastic! The Mac Pro, despite having twice the CPUs and being a lot faster, also runs a good 33% cooler than the Powermac! Once I got the Mac Pro and added a couple of gigs of RAM to it, it was time to try VMWare.

I grabbed a spare 250GB HD off the shelf and installed it as the second internal HD on the Mac Pro. I then setup a 200GB Windows XP virtual machine on that HD and went ahead and installed XP. I was amazed at how fast XP ran! XP was running faster in a virtual machine than it was running on a dedicated computer! After running some tests on the virtual machine, I determined that everything in Windows worked perfectly in the virtual machine. The problems I had in Virtual PC on the Powermac were now gone. I had a fully functional Windows XP machine now running in a virtual machine.

For the last several weeks, I've been running the Mac Pro exclusively, using that XP virtual machine for the rare times I need Windows. Considering how I'm a Windows developer, I spend very little time in Windows at home. I'm able to start up that virtual machine, do whatever I need for a few minutes, and then shut it down. My old Windows XP PC has been sitting there under the desk, turned off for weeks. Before I would turn that thing on every day and have two hot computers running, heating up the room and eating a lot of power. Now, I have one computer running cooler and using less electricity, and yet with all the same functionality.

I still kept that old Windows PC there under the desk though. I suppose it was out of habit or out of a feeling of leaving it there 'just in case.' I've come to realize that there is no 'just in case' anymore. That box is now useless. A couple days ago, I finally went 'cold turkey' and unplugged it - removing it from the desk. I'm now running a single computer, the Mac Pro, and I don't miss that other computer at all. I still have that mess of 'spaghetti' behind the desk to clean up, but I'm happy to say that I've given up the dual computer life and am now happily living with just a single computer.

I don't forsee myself ever buying a PC again.

Last week, I bought a Mac Pro. I have to say that I truly love that thing! It is so fast! It is the first computer I've had that could keep up to me... When I really get going on a computer, I have so much stuff going on at the same time that most computers can't keep up. This one can. One problem I've been having for the last week though was a cause of some concern for me.

The problem was, At times it didn't seem to be displaying anything on the monitor, even though the monitor was on and the computer was fully booted up. I would turn on the monitor, then turn on the Pro and then wait... and wait... and wait. It seemsed like sometimes it would come up within a good 20 seconds and sometimes it took 5 minutes before I saw anything on the screen. I often wouldn't even see the Apple logo that you usually see when the Mac Pro first boots up. I was getting worried that something was defective.

After much experimenting and consulting with knowlegable friends, I think I've figured out the problem. It seems like at times the Mac Pro has trouble syncing with the monitor... In other words, it can't properly communicate with the monitor. This causes nothing to show up. As best I can figure this is some kind of odd driver bug on the Mac Pro. The solution I found that seems to work is to turn on the monitor first, give the monitor a few seconds to start up, and THEN turn on the Mac Pro. It seems like if you let the monitor fully start up before starting the Mac Pro, that it will work properly. What I had been doing was turning on the monitor first and then immediately turning on the Mac Pro. This seemed to cause the Mac Pro to sync to try to sync to the monitor before the monitor had fully started up. If you give the monitor a few seconds to start up first, it seems to fix the problem. You can also just turn the monitor off for a couple seconds and then turn it back on. This should cause the Mac Pro to resync with the monitor also.

Apple really needs to fix this bug, though.

It's here!

Yesterday I received my Mac Pro - exactly 2 years and 1 month from the day I got my old Powermac (and first *real* Mac).

The new Mac Pro wasn't without it's share of small problems. When I ordered it last week, I made sure to ask if I was going to get one of those new, really slim Mac keyboards and a copy of the new iLife 08. They assured me I would. I get the box yesterday afternoon at work and open it up to find that they did not send me the new keyboard or the new iLife 08! So I called them, pretty angry and said I wanted them to overnight me the keyboard and iLife. They said they would, but that it would take a few days for it to ship. The earliest it would ship would be Friday. I wasn't happy about this, but it's not like I had any choice. So I accepted and hung up. I later discovered that the Mac DID come with iLife 08, so I now have a second copy of it on the way! Oh well. I also checked my order later on last night and discovered that they had already mailed out the keyboard and iLife overnight to me. I should be getting it today! Way to go Apple! Once more, they show some excellent customer service and come through for me!

The second problem I had was trying to reinstall OS X on the Mac Pro. I had ordered the Mac Pro with a 250GB HD, since that's what it came with, but I had a 500GB HD that I wanted to use instead, so the first thing I did was install that into the computer - before I even turned it on for the first time. The problem was, the dern thing refused to install on the 500GB HD! It must have taken me four complete installs before I figured out how to solve this problem. The problem is, that the OS X install by default tries to upgrade the current OS X version on your machine. That means that it was only allowing me to 'install' (actually upgrade) over the existing OS X on the 250GB HD. I found out that you need to change the install to an 'Erase and Install' in order to get it to install to a different HD. Once I got that working, I was able to install to the 500GB HD and wipe the old one.

I still have a lot of other stuff to setup on it. I have to copy all my stuff back over from the Powermac, and restore all my email, browser bookmarks etc. I also need to reinstall a bunch of apps and put in that additional 2GB of RAM that I'm getting today. Tonight is going to be another busy night.

A few months ago, I bought my friend Dave's old Mac Mini from him. This was the same Mac Mini that I sold to HIM a couple years before when I upgraded to my Powermac. He bought my Mini because he had heard me raving about how good the Mac was and he wanted to try it. The problem is, the Mac Mini is a sadly underpowered computer for all but the most basic of tasks. That's why I got rid of it in favor of the Powermac. The Mac Mini did do its intended job though - it convinced me to try a Mac. It didn't take me long to go from buying a Mini to buying a full blown Powermac. At the time, when Dave sold me back the Mac Mini, I understood his feeling that the Mini wasn't adequate. I shared that opinion. I was just disapointed that Dave had 'lost his mind' and gone back to Windows. Looks like Windows Vista finally pushed him over the edge though.

Yesterday, I went with him and he bought a Mac Pro! This is basically the same Mac Pro that I ordered that will be arriving in a couple days. He loves this new Mac! I can see why. This thing is much more powerful than the Mini and it can easily keep up with things. I'm glad Dave came back to his senses! :)

In the interests of getting him up to speed on the Mac as soon as possible, here are a few apps he might find useful. Note that MOST of these apps are free.

Cyberduck: A great drag & drop FTP program. Source code is available for this if you want to learn some Mac programming.

Quicksilver: You MUST download this now! If you are a typist, this program makes it VERY easy to run any program (and do many other things) without once touching the mouse. Source code is not available for this yet, but will be once Leopard ships.

Vienna: A good, free RSS reader. It may not hold up against NetNewsWire, but it is free and quite capable. Source code is available for this.

Unison: A great newsgroup reader. $24.95 from Panic Software.

Coda: Supposed to be a great web page builder application. Costs $69.

AOL Radio: America Online's free online radio program. They FINALLY came out with a Mac version!

Recently, my web hosting provider offered me a free one year membership to a new site called Bandwagon.

Bandwagon, is an online service that offers to provide online backups of your iTunes library. They offer the service for $24 a year. At first my impression was "Hmm, $2/month to keep a backup of my 60GB iTunes library. Not bad." Of course after further reading, I found that they only store your iTunes metadata which really isn't that much space at all. You need to provide your own online storage through FTP. Ok, so not as good a deal, but I have tons of HD space on my web host and plenty of bandwidth to upload it, so I sign up for my free year and install the software.

The program installs no problem, reads my iTunes library and starts FTPing files up to my FTP site on my web host. "Great, now I'll just let it run for a few hours and my collection is backed up." The software needs some work though. The GUI uses that black, partially transparent style of window that is so popular on OS X these days. While pretty, that damn GUI insists on being the topmost application at all times! Which means I can't get rid of the thing shy of closing the window entirely! (which doesn't actually stop the program, it just hides the window). Ok, that annoying feature is gone.

After letting it run for a while, I decided to check and see how far it had gotten. Ok, after an hour I've only uploaded TWO files? What the heck? That's when I remember that while the download speed of my DSL is 6Mb/sec (about 800 kilobytes per second), the upload speed is much lower - around 800kb/sec. That means my upload speed is 10 times slower than my download speed! Now usually with a DSL connection that's fine since most of what you do is downloading. In this case though, it's a problem. For this, it's all uploading. Bandwagon then tells me that it will take 12 days for my entire 60GB iTunes library to upload! I am not going to leave my computer on for 12 days straight, just to upload this stuff! It would be easier to just burn it to a few DVDs.

It seems to me that online backup sites really aren't practical for someone running on DSL who has to backup a large amount of data. Until we start getting DSL with 6Mb/sec upload as well as download, this service is of little use.

It's not very often that I write about AOL, and its even rarer when I write to complement them, but this is just too cool. AOL just released a Mac version of the AOL Radio software! I used to love listening to the Windows version of AOL Radio (called Netscape Radio back then). Ever since my switch to Mac, that's been unavailable. Now I can listen to it again! (They have an excellent 'Hair Metal' channel.)

Way to go AOL! Let's see some more Mac ports of software (like Yahoo Music Unlimited...)