Local Insanity

My new MacBook finally arrived yesterday! I got it mostly set up in a short amount of time and am now testing it to see what it does well, what it does not so well. Here are my initial impressions:

The Good

• It’s a Mac. Need I say more?
• It’s fast - at 2GHz core duo, it’s a huge improvement over my 1GHz G4
• Built-in iSight, Mag-safe power, magnetic latch, bright screen
• Running WishRadar tests takes under a minute!

The Bad

• The keys can be difficult to press, particularly the arrow keys
• The bezel on the screen is a bit big for my tastes - doesn’t really match OS X
• Plastic makes it feel a little cheaper than my old TiBook

In all, it’s a solid machine, and the screen size doesn’t seem to bother me. Hopefully I’ll solve or forget about its problems as time goes on and I realize how much a faster machine will help me code.

And here I thought that Paul Thurrott was the most outspoken personality in support of Microsoft Windows. Even if he is, I don’t think he holds a candle to Mark Russinovich. What I don’t understand about this guy is that he seems to know Windows really, really well - like he wrote it (not really) and all the little utilities he uses to probe it (really!) - yet he seems to like the system. He has not looked into the eye of the beast and run away screaming.

I guess Mac OS X and/or Linux is not for everyone, but at least those of us on this side of the fence can pretty much ignore things like the Sony BMG DRM debacle that Mark covers so well.

My PowerBook repair has been dragging on for a while now. It took about a month to get Apple to register my AppleCare properly with my PB. Now I’ve sent it in and I’m just waiting… and waiting… and waiting since October 3rd. At almost two weeks, I hope they do what they did with djbsquared of #adium’s PB: they replaced it after three weeks of “Hold - Awaiting Part”. If they replace my TiBook with a nice, shiny, new AlBook, I’ll be quite excited. That will make me and Apple about even with the amount of extra trouble they’ve caused me. For my own reference, the dispatch number is D5396382, serial number QT3160W5N4M.

The new iPod is not called the iPod video for good reason. It seems to lack certain features you would expect from a video player, such as fast-forward and rewind. That last bit is heresay, but what I do know for sure is that iTunes has a way to go before the real iPod video makes its debut. iTunes video playback, by default, is in the album art viewer in the bottom-left. For a music video, or something else you’re not really watching, this works, but for an episode of Lost? I don’t think so. Full-screen is a button away, which is somewhat funny to me because QuickTime doesn’t support full-screen without going pro or an annoying script hack.

Then there’s the issue of the iTMS content. Five shows may not be much, but it’s a start. The issue of HD is difficult, because I prefer HD over standard def, and I do notice the difference, especially when watching it on my computer (which is the majority of the time). The trouble is, of course, that HD would take quite long to download compared to standard, even when using h.264. The other problem is the iPod - it can’t play an HD file nor store very many on it. Thus, in order to allow transfer to the iPod, there are a few possibilities:

• The local machine would scale the video down as needed
• The download would include an HD version and a SD version
• The store offers two versions: HD and SD

Each of these has problems. The first would take extra time in to process the video, on the order of hours for slower machines. The second would increase the file size for both video-ready iPod owners and others. Since iTunes doesn’t allow redownloading of previously purchased music (for free), you couldn’t download just the HD version unless you know you’ll never buy a video-ready iPod (or are willing to pay for the show again). The third option would probably just confuse people, and would take away from the simplicity that is the draw of the iPod and iTunes for many people.

The solution? The current state of affairs - SD only - is a solution, but one that I feel slightly bad about. I feel wary of buying the entire season of a show on iTunes because, for a comparable price, I can buy the DVDs and use them in my DVD player, computer, rip them, copy them, use HandBrake to put them on my (non-existent) video-ready iPod, or whatever. What I hope happens is that by the time the iPod video comes around, there will be a good selection of video from the iTMS and that Apple takes one of the routes outlined above to make HD possible.

Update: In keeping with the playback for music, the new iPod supports scrubbing in video exactly as it does in audio according to an Ars article.

While people have been able to run certain versions of linux on their Macs for some time, for the great majority of users having a Mac meant you ran OS X, and vice versa. With the announcement of Apple switching to Intel processors, will this equivalence remain? I’m curious as to whether one couldn’t just get the x86 version of OS X to run on any ol’ (powerful enough) PC. What could Apple do to prevent this? Will running Windows on a Mac be possible w/o emulation?

On that note, emulation will be much faster since the emulator should not have to emulate the processor. Virtual PC is the main emulator for OS X, and it is now owned by Microsoft. Does MS like this move? Are they happy? Will Apple set itself up as a direct competitor to Microsoft? From the rumors I’ve heard over the years, Apple’s hardware line is too profitable for them not to have. If that is true, it would answer my earlier question about OS X on your Dell machine.

This comes at a time when I’m considering my career options. I’ve thought about getting into Mac development, and the prospect still interests me, but suddenly buying a G5 doesn’t. I want to wait for a new, Intel one. G6? Who knows what they’ll call the machine? PowerMac P4? They’ll probably continue with the GX naming, as the G3 was a Motorolla chip, not IBM (right?). But it was still PowerPC, so… I don’t know the history of it that well. At any rate, I think Apple has covered its bases on this one, and I think the transition will go smoothly. I still think OS X is the best platform around, and I’ll continue to use it, but some of my fire has gone out of it. My PowerBook is now in middle age (25 months), and there is no replacement in sight. Not until next year anyway. That’s okay, but it just feels more shaky than it did a few days ago. All of a sudden PowerMac G5s are not an option for me. Oh well. It’ll be an interesting next few years.

I found this awesome javascript library a while back called prototype. I’ve started using it on bruinwalk.com and it’s been great. One of the things I implemented on the home page was a rotator for the Daily Bruin headlines, but there wasn’t a built-in object to handle it, so I wrote a crappy set of functions to wrap Effect.Appear and Effect.Fade, but it’s not extensible and it’d have to be rewritten to work with any other setup.

Now I’ve done that. You can download it from here, and it is dependent on the prototype library. It was written against version 1.2.1, but with Effect2 in mind. If you find it useful and modify it, post a comment on what you did with it.

Google has done it again. This time, they’ve got themselves into the portal arena. If you have a Google account (like Gmail) then you can try it. It’s really easy to set up and it feels right. Like a desktop app, not a web app. It doesn’t offer everything you might want yet, but it does it well, and it even offers drag-n-drop customization! Yay for Google!

No that’s not an accidental ‘S’ on the end. Read more at DrunkenBlog.

I’ve started reading GTD by David Allen and I must say I’m fairly impressed, but in a ‘why didn’t I think of that?’ way. In my push to get things done more effectively this quarter, I lost steam about halfway through. There were a number of reasons for this, but I think the biggest one is that I had no system in place to keep myself organized.

Personal Digital Assistant

In the past I had a Palm Pilot - one of the originals - that I used to keep contact information. I tried using its Todo list feature and calendaring system, but I found that I never looked at the stuff again until the relevant tasks/events were long gone. Such a system actually hurts you, because you’re spending time inputting the data but getting nothing out of it. A few years after giving that up, in the midst of my pro-Microsoft phase, I bought a PocketPC under the assumption that it was the Palm Pilot that wasn’t being effective, and that a newer, higher tech PDA would be. I just assumed that it was better than a paper solution because the paper solution couldn’t sync with my computer. It turns out that the MS software was so ineffective that syncing probably took longer doing it “automatically” than by hand. I couldn’t shake - or even see - the assumption that digital was better than paper, so I stopped using the PocketPC and replaced it with… nothing.

Enter Apple

About the same time I realized that Microsoft wasn’t all that great I started noticing the Mac. It was sleek and slender (the PowerBooks), sexy (the Dock, Aqua in general), powerful (Terminal.app and everything underpinning it), and altogether elegant. But it’s a Mac. It’s not Windows. Could I really switch to something that wasn’t Windows? I was so invested, I thought, that I probably couldn’t. Most of the programming I knew how to do was for Windows, all my software was for Windows, all my friends used Windows… But the curiosity remained. After talking to a professor or two with a PowerBook and reading about it, I decided to take the plunge. At first it was confusing. It was new, which was exciting, but sometimes frustrating. I couldn’t perform the simplest of tasks without expending significant mental energy. I wish I could say that now that I’m used to it that everything is problem-free, but that’s not true. I have had problems and things do not operate exactly as I’d like. But the difference between things not behaving as they should on the Mac vs. on Windows is in the community. The Mac community listens, responds, and engages you. Many of the apps I use were written by groups of 1-4, and are very approachable (online, of course).

You may be wondering what this has to do with productivity. For a time my PowerBook was my PDA. Though not well suited to the purpose, it performed better than either of my previous machines. I noticed a few trends emerging:

1. I actually like using it, and I gather my information and use the PowerBook to process it
2. I began to really customize and tweak my setup because I wasn’t living under the constant looming shadow of the monthly reformat my Windows machine required - this broke down much of the subconscious barrier to use it
3. While I could use it effectively to perform certain tasks, it sucked if I had to draw something or take a quick note - such things just got discarded

43folders.com and the Hipster PDA

The site that introduced me to GTD, 43folders.com, is one man’s response to the Windows-centric view of that book (and the productivity world, more generally). I’m not sure who first coined the term Hipster PDA, but it is just a bunch of 3×5 index cards held together by a binder clip. This is my new PDA, and so far it works nicely. I can carry it with me easily, I can use my own pencil as a stylus, I don’t have to worry about dropping it or spilling water on it, it syncs with my computer just about as fast as my old PocketPC, and it never runs out of batteries. I’m still in the honeymoon phase of using it, so we’ll see what happens a few months down the road. In general I’m pleased.

Procrastination

This being finals week, my brain is particularly sensitive to anything that might offer a distraction… like… um… this post. But I’ve allotted time for it! The bane of my existence right now is StarCraft. For Pete’s sake Blizzard! Why’d you have to produce such a good game?! I’m going to eject it from my PowerBook, and go put it in a safe place… there we go. I’ve now raised the barrier to playing it to a level that hopefully will keep me from doing so. While it is my choice to play it, it is hard not to. This is not an excuse, it’s a reason. Now all I have to do is lower the barrier to getting work done to a sufficiently low level so I’ll actually do it. Here’s to getting over my fear of management and “stuff”.

My usual practice in the past regarding shareware was to find an activation key online, usually at AstalaVista. The reason for this is that I had no job, and had no money beyond my ‘allowance’. I didn’t pay for it simply out of habit, and I regarded shareware as somehow inferior to freeware.

I’m not reversing my position, but the fact that I’ve bought TextMate, Transmit, and NewsFire in the last 30 days tells me I’ve undergone some sort of paradigm shift. I think this came about when I started thinking about my own soon-to-be-looking-for-a-job self. I think it’d be cool to be able to sustain myself on the applications I’ve written as part of a small company. I’ve never really much liked working for others, so the self-employment route looks appealing to me. Sometime over the last few months I’ve realized, though perhaps not fully consciously, that all these apps I’ve been pirating are made by guys (yeah, not many women in this field) who feel the same way, and by not paying for the apps I use, I’m preventing them from achieving that goal. I certainly wouldn’t want this to happen to me, so I’ve begun to acknowledge the right of these people to be paid for their work.

Open Source is another model I find intriguing. It involves a few people to a few thousand people who collaboratively work on the project. The code is out in the open. It’s free, and because of this it lacks the normal pay-to-use mechanism of proprietary software. It requires another motivator. Some people are paid to work on open source projects by the companies they work for (IBM, RedHat). Some open source projects make money through services and support. Many die because they lack a persistent motivator, and this is too bad.

I’ll sidestep the issue of which model is better and claim that they are good for different things. The nature of the project should determine what model is used. An extension to the HTTP protocol to handle flash crowds? Open source. A standards-compliant web browser? Open source. A marketing tool masquerading as a web browser? Proprietary. A specialized text editor for developers. Either way. When something can be built on top of and is meant to be built on top of, open source is probably best. If not, proprietary is fine. As for me, I hope to do some of both in the future.