I started writing about the computers under my care really for just one reason: so that I would have some record of what I’d done, so I could stop making the same mistakes over and over again.

I don’t know if I’ve accomplished that, exactly, but at least it’s been entertaining watching me try.

Since many of you are new around here, and this is an admittedly quirky personal site, let me point you towards some other computer logs that may interest you:

Commissioned

The following computers are currently in service.

• Eöl, my new Black MacBook running OS X 10.5.2 (Leopard).

  Eöl replaced Vinyamar.

• Tsiolkovsky, my wife’s Toughbook W2, continues to crunch numbers and hang in there, despite losing the “B” key to a toddler-related accident a few weeks ago. The lower left hand side keyboard is also starting to have some problems, but there are no new issues to report with Ubuntu Dapper Drake.

  Tsiolkovsky is slated for replacement in the next few weeks.

• Hithlum, my 17” PowerBook G4, is as lovely and elegant as ever, even if her PPC chip is getting a little long in the tooth. She still does great work, however, and is running Mac OS X 10.4.11 (Tiger).
• An unnamed Thinkpad T43, my work computer, runs Windows XP and is completely uninteresting to me as a computer. My company gave it to me to work with, I work with it. End of story.
• Tigana, a Sony Vaio 505-TR running Red Hat 7.2, has a busted power supply and no battery power. I will need to wipe the hard drive before I can consider her decommissioned.

Speaking of which…

Decommissioned

These computers have left the building:

• Vinyamar, my Macbook Air, went through two revisions before being sent back to Apple.
• Al-Rassan / Ithilien, a Thinkpad 1400 running SuSE 9.x.
• Arbonne (I) / Sarantium / Atlantis / Lórien, a beige 750MHz Pentium III tower I picked up from CompUSA which ran Windows 98, Windows 2000, and more Linux distributions than I really care to remember.
• Arbonne (II) and Gorhaut, two identical Linux towers who ran Red Hat 9.

You will no doubt notice certain themes in the names.

Each computer has its own category, some with more information than others. Hopefully you’ll find something you like.

Thanks again for visiting!

Cheers,
Brett

• Merrystar’s beloved Panasonic Toughbook W2 Tsiolkovsky will soon be joined by, of all things, a Dell XPS M1330. The Panasonic rep really blew the sale and couldn’t get her either a W or Y series within her department’s budget, so she opted for a screamin’ fast dual 2.6GHz instead. After years of making ugly laptops, Dell seems to have finally gotten this one right.

  We’ll see how it looks in person when the Alpine White version (with pink hard drive and mouse, naturally) arrives later this week.

  I’m actually really excited to see how Ubuntu runs on it.

• I wasn’t planning on upgrading my Powerbook G4 Hithlum until its AppleCare expired in November, but the recent release of the iPhone SDK (which requires an Intel chip and Leopard to use) accelerated my timetable. The 1.67GHz Powerbook is the fastest G4 chip out there, but it’s now the punchline in recent Mac benchmarks.

  Let’s call it like it is: the G4 is dog slow running Leopard, and it’s not that much faster running Tiger.

  So, after convincing myself to get the 2.5GHz Core 2 Duo Macbook Pro, I then did an about-face when I got to the ordering page, decided to embrace constraints, and bought what meets my needs now: the Macbook Air. Yes, the one I was waffling about.

  And you know what? I don’t regret it for a minute. $1000 less, featherweight, and fewer distractions? Done.

  It arrives next week.

While I’ll let you know initial impressions and put up new computer pages next week, Merrystar and I have important decisions to make while we wait.

Namely, what are we going to name them? A quick nomenclature refresher:

• Merrystar has two possible conventions to follow: laptop or dual-core. Laptops are named after science vessels in Star Trek: Oberth-class or Nova-class. (I think Nebula-class vessels are also allowed.) Dual-core machines are Excelsior-class. There’s a lot of options available.

• My convention is to use lands from science-fiction and fantasy: Macs use the lands of J.R.R. Tolkien. I’ve been going through a Beleriand phase, but might shift east over the Misty Mountains if the names are right. The areas of Númenor are also options, but not very melodic ones.

Hmmm. Lots of thinking to do here.

That can’t be good.

(This is for both my Tiger and Leopard external backups. Looks like “Ignore ownership on this volume” somehow got checked.)

Update 11:11pm: Found the bug that caused it in the first place. That’s the good news.

The other good news is that I can restore permissions to the Tiger backup with the next backup, which is currently running.

Bad news is that I’ll probably have to reinstall my test Leopard system on the external drive to fix it, but that’s less critical than having a bootable backup right now. (After I fix this one, I’ll retrieve the offsite one to see if that fixes it.)

Also, I don’t want to talk about the Green Bay game. That’s the last time I ever root for a team because of expediency. It backfired with Texas, and now it’s backfired with the Giants.

If you’re a fan of the command line on OS X, I suggest you take a look at Visor, originally from the good folks at Blacktree. It’s a quake-style terminal window that instantly appears; I’m finding it even more useful than Quicksilver while working on shell scripting.

(So much for ‘sticking with the defaults.’)

Considering upgrading your Powerbook G4 to Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard)? After running with Leopard since its release, let me give you some unsolicited advice:

Skip it.

No, really. Just wait, and get it on a MacBook instead.

It comes down entirely to performance vis-a-vis Tiger. Here are Hithlum’s Geekbench scores:

• Leopard with updates (10.5.1) and Spotlight indexing complete: 804
• Clean Tiger install (10.4): 813
• Tiger with updates (10.4.11): 917
• Tiger (10.4.11) with Spotlight indexing complete: 942

While Spotlight performance in Tiger may be slower than in Leopard, overall chip performance is 17% better. I knew that 10.5 was optimized for the Intel chips, but that’s crazy to think that that sort of degradation is acceptable.

By way of comparison, machines with Intel chips running Leopard do significantly better than PowerPC chips. Most of the MacBooks are around 2500-3000, with some of the Mac Pros clocking in over 8200. Leopard seems to be a pretty good investment for Intel-based Macs.

But combined with the Disk Utility problems, random crashes, and overall sluggishness I’ve experienced with Leopard, the upgrade isn’t worth it on my older PPC machine. I’m certainly not going to upgrade my mother-in-law’s G5 iMac to it after this.

So, it’s back to Tiger for me on my Mac. Experiment over, back to work.

Anyone want to buy a Family Pack Leopard DVD set? I’ll trade you for Tiger DVDs…

Mostly, it just leaves me grumpy that I purchased the family pack. I'm not going to upgrade any of my family's G4s or G5s at this point, and may very well go back to Tiger on Hithlum until it's time for a new laptop in a year or two. ]]> 4323@http://brettpeters.org/log/ Brett Peters Computer Log 2007-12-23T20:41:48-05:00 http://brettpeters.org/log/2007/12/04/thoughts-on-upgrading.html#4287 Ain't broke? Don't fix it.

Now, if only I could heed my own advice.

1. I was seriously considering upgrading the software that runs a few of my sites to Movable Type 4.x to allow the use of the the iPhone/MT interface plugin. Yes, you read that right: I'm considering installing an entire CMS to get an interface for my phone. This plugin makes posting from the iPhone very, very easy. And a clean install of MT 4.x is actually quite easy as such things go.

   But upgrading from an old version, with an extremely custom template and unsupported database? Very, very difficult.

   So difficult, in fact, that I gave up trying to upgrade the existing installation and instead evaluated how much effort it would be recode several sites on the clean install.

   And the answer? Way more effort than it's worth.

2. I'm of a similar feeling of my second recent upgrade, of that to Apple's Leopard on my G4 Powerbook, Hithlum.

   My first upgrade attempt resulted in an unbearably slow system. This was not the desired outcome.

   So, after several hours debugging processes, killing off all sorts of little performance-stealing problems, I opted for a clean Tiger (10.4) install and trusted my backups. Tiger was great in all the areas I remember, and weak in all the other areas I remembered (cough cough Spotlight cough).

   After a few days of that, I thought that since there were enough other people having success with a clean install, that I would give it a try with a clean upgrade back to Leopard. In other words, I lost my marbles.

   You know what? I have not been entirely happy with Hithlum since I started meddling. And really, there's no turning back.

   Leopard may be faster than Tiger, but it doesn't feel faster. The 10.5.1 update helped stabilize some of the applications, and I'm sure that on a newer machine that I would be happy as a clam with Leopard. But instead I ask, was this really worth the time, effort, and money I spent?

   I suspect that the answer is no.

So: Future Brett! Listen up! I will make this simple for you. NEVER UPGRADE! Okay? Never.

(I don't know why I bother. Future Brett never listens.)]]> 4287@http://brettpeters.org/log/ Brett Peters Site Log 2007-12-04T01:48:52-05:00 http://brettpeters.org/log/2007/10/26/os-x-105-leopard.html#4254

Well, there goes my plans for a productive weekend.

Yep, it’s time to inventory the Mac OS X apps I have running on Hithlum again. (Parts I, II.) I’ve added a few new programs to the mix.

• I’ve used Chicken of the VNC a bit to control some Windows boxes, but generally find Remote Desktop Connection or Fog Creek’s Copilot to be superior for desktop support.

• I tried out EtherPEG and think it’s an eye-opener. Literally.

• I’ve started using iMediaBrowser to find things quickly, but suspect this will go in the Utilities folder soon enough.

• NetNewsWire Lite has replaced Google Reader as my RSS feed reader of choice. Google Reader was just so slow.

• I’d already changed many of these system preferences via the Terminal, but TinkerTool provides a nice interface.

• I occasionally have Twitterific up and running, though I honestly don’t use Twitter enough to make it an essential app. (Usually I post through a Quicksilver+Applescript hack.)

• I’ve started using WriteRoom as a composing tool instead of JDarkRoom, and am generally happier with it.

• Visor is a quick half-screen Terminal window that I’m trying out. It’s faster on the command line than invoking through Quicksilver, but may require some adjustments.

• I’ve tried out the excellent DEFCON Globe Screensaver from Ambrosia Software, and it’s a keeper.

Still in use:

• Quicksilver
• MacGPG and GPGMail
• SignatureProfiler
• jUploader
• xscreensaver
• Backlight
• Adium X
• Mac The Ripper / HandBrake
• DynDNS Updater
• Excel
• X11 + The Gimp
• GLTerminal
• iTunes XHTML Playlist
• MarsEdit — I liked this one enough to buy the license.
• OTR Proxy

Rarely used, but still useful:

• Audacity and the LAME codec
• Colloquy
• Crack Attack
• Facebook Exporter for iPhoto
• ImageWell
• iStat
• MonoLingual
• Nocturne
• Stuffit
• Telekinesis

The following were installed, but have recently been ploinked:

• Apple Backup
• Camino
• Cocoalicious
• Entourage
• Firefox
• Flip4Mac
• Google Earth
• JDarkRoom
• Keyword Assistant (which I really liked, but was replaced by iPhoto 7.)
• Mail Stamps
• MailFollowup
• Mail Tags
• MacSaber
• pearLyrics
• Stellarium
• Think
• VLC

Her: “That’s Noah, and that’s his mommy.”

Him: “Dats Noah, and dats his mommy.”

Her: “Would you like to see pictures of Trip?”

Him: Makes agreeing noises. Merrystar calls up his site.

Him: “Backhoeses!”

And then he reached out and tried to swipe the page on Merrystar’s Toughbook, just like it was an iPhone.

Me: “You’re going the wrong way.”

Her: “You hush.”

Him: “Boats! T-t on the boat!” more swiping motions, more of the page not going the right way.

I find it both wonderful and a little scary that my son knows that much about using my iPhone already.

Epilogue

After Trip had gone to sleep, we had the following exchange:

Me: “Finally, I found something your computer can’t do.”

Her: Swipes at my laptop screen. “Doesn’t look like yours can, either.”

Have I ever come out ahead in these?

Don’t answer that.

It's an icepack. Boy, do these laptops get hot!

Me: I’m glad drive prices are dropping. I just got another hard drive for my laptop.

Them: Oh, you’re upgrading?

Me: No, backing up. This will make it three total.

Them: Why not just burn everything to CD or DVD?

Me: Er, because they fail and take your data with them?

Them: What?

Me: Gesundheit.

I then follow up with my tragic story of how I archived my entire digital life to CD/DVD, but when I got my Mac and started loading everything back, I discovered the sad truth: CDs and DVDs will degrade over time, and you don’t know it’s unusable until it actually goes. About half of the disks I made within the last five years were gone, so I resolved to go with a strategy with visibility, redundancy, and easy access: everything on a hard drive. CD/DVDs are only throwaway backups or installation disks in my house. The conversation would usually end with me talking again about the cost of hard drives coming down, me realizing I’d just spent 5 minutes ranting about the failure rates of optical media, and then a polite change of subject.

Now, I admit, I haven’t handled this conversation particularly well. I feel particularly guilty for having had it with my Mom and not immediately following it with concrete, practical, written advice as to what you should do to prevent data loss. It’s complicated by my running on a Mac, and nearly everyone else I’ve talked to using Windows. It’s further complicated because I think of my Mac as a UNIX box, so I can’t just say “go download X program and set it up.”

Instead, I have to say something stupid, like, “I have a series of interlocking scripts that automatically archive critical files and rsync incremental backups between external and offsite drives to ensure that the data lives in as many protected places as is practically possible.”

In other words, I’m part of the Command Line Ninja Brigade of Mac users, which appears to exist in a different online world than the Sweet Delicious GUI Army of Mac users. I don’t understand why this divide exists in the online Apple community, but it seems like you’re either for the Terminal, or against the Terminal, and never the twain shall meet. The opinions each hold are strikingly different, yet the crossover between the two is so easy. That’s why it’s a Mac!

I honestly don’t understand it. But there it is, Horatio: yet another undreamt of thing.

So.

Here’s my concrete, practical, written advice for backing up stuff, no matter what you run, or how you personally feel about the command line.

• If you run Windows, I recommend Gina Trapani’s excellent Lifehacker article Automatically back up your hard drive for advice in both software selection and how to set up a schedule of backups that will save your butt when Murphy’s Law strikes.

• If you run a Mac and don’t want to mess around with the Terminal, there are a lot of programs out there like Carbon Cloner or SuperDuper that you can use. I’ve not used any of them, but there’s a Mac Observer tutorial on backups that covers them in some detail.

• If you run UNIX, or are a member of the Mac CLNB, perhaps you’ll find my backup strategy useful inspiration for polishing your own data archiving obsession.

I even wrote the backup script in haiku. Just for you.

I was recently updating my about page when I realized that I’d really not kept up with the good things on Hithlum, only the bad.

And that’s unfortunate, because my Mac really rocks. I’m glad that I left the switching-distros-solves-problems world of Linux behind, even though I look at Tsiolkovsky with an admittedly covetous eye.

(But if Apple put out a ruggedized subcompact MacBook Pro with an optical drive? I am so there.)

So I thought I’d start by revisiting my original list of software that I’d posted a year ago and see what I’m actually using, versus what didn’t work out for me. A lot of these applications have been good to me. Maybe you’ll find them useful, too.

Here are my standards, the applications that make Hithlum a joy to use:

• Quicksilver remains the only application I run all the time. Every week I learn something new about how to use it. I remapped my Caps Lock key to Control just so I could trigger Quicksilver even faster. Oh, and there’s command line interaction, so I don’t even need to keep Terminal open!

At the time, I said: “Holy holy holy. Quicksilver changes everything.” I stand by that and can only add more emphasis.

• Safari and Camino are currently vying for my affections as web browsers. Safari had speed problems when I used it as a RSS news reader, but the font rendering is incredible. (I’ve since switched to Google Reader for news.) Camino feels snappier and doesn’t bog down after its been open a while, but it doesn’t do as good a job with text. We’ll see who winds up on top.

• Mail continues to be my main mail client. Hawk Wings has been a great resource, pointing me towards all sorts of useful (and not so useful) add ons. I use MacGPG and GPGMail in conjuction with the built-in x.509 certificate support, Mail Stamps, SignatureProfiler, and MailFollowup. That’s actually about it — I don’t use Mail Tags as often as I used to, but I keep it around. I end up using the ⌥⌘T command to file mail quickly and let Spotlight sort it all out later.

• iPhoto. I spend a sizeable part of every night working in iPhoto, processing pictures and whatnot. I’m still on the iLife ‘05 package but will happily upgrade to ‘07… whenever it actually comes out. I have gripes about the ‘05 version that I know are fixed in ‘06, so now it’s just a waiting game.

• I upload photos to Flickr and Zooomr with jUploader. The various plugins and dedicated uploaders just haven’t done it for me. I keep hoping, though…

• Preview. You know what? This simple application is fantastic and is the unsung hero of OS X 10.4. How do people get by without it?

• Emacs is my primary text editor, but I use neither the Cocoa nor the Carbon versions. I, uh, use the default terminal one. Do I lose points for that?

• xscreensaver. What can I say? I love me some GLMatrix action combined with Backlight. Mmmm, green and black desktop goodness.

There are a few other programs I use on a regular basis, just not every day, which I consider essential.

• Address Book. Does what it’s supposed to do. Syncing problems with Entourage, though, led me to resort to manual imports and a lot of backups.

• Adium X is still in the Dock, used fairly often but not every day. iChat didn’t have a chance.

• I wish iCal integrated better with either Google Calendar or Exchange. I love the interface, but not the syncing.

• The Mac The Ripper / HandBrake combo sees a lot of use, as I rip movies to watch on iTunes. I watch a lot of movies in iTunes these days — much more than I listen to music.

Then there’s a large group of specialized programs that are useful in one way or another, but not part of my normal mundane computing existence. Or, I haven’t grokked them yet.

• Audacity for audio processing. I use it to rip old cassette tapes to MP3. (Don’t forget the LAME codec.)

• I’ve only recently downloaded Cocoalicious, a del.icio.us bookmarks manager. Still figuring out if I need it or not.

• Colloquy. IRC client. I’ve used it twice, works.

• Crack Attack, one of Merrystar’s favorites.

• DynDNS Updater, to keep my dynamic hostname associated with my Mac. I haven’t looked at it since I installed it, which is how it’s supposed to be.

• Entourage does all sorts of bad things when I try to sync it with both Exchange (for work) and iCal (to publish my calendar for my family.) Don’t like the mail interface at all, ditched it very soon after I tried it out. There was also an incident that reinforced the importance of keeping work and play separate, so I don’t do anything work-related on the Mac anymore. Entourage’s days are numbered.

• Excel, on the other hand, continues to blow OpenOffice’s Spreadsheet out of the water. Sorry, but until you can do pivot tables, you’re not in the game. Possibly the best part of MS Office.

• Firefox is only installed for those rare occasions where I’ve needed to get into a site that didn’t work with Safari and didn’t recognize Camino. I may discard this one soon.

• Flip4Mac, plays windows media files.

• I finally installed X11 so I can run The Gimp for image manipulation. Works just like I remember, maybe a little better.

• GLTerminal, a full screen terminal. Cool but clunky.

• Google Earth remains very cool, but its utility is debatable. (It was helpful when looking for a house, but that’s over now.) Bandwidth hog.

• I use iTunes XHTML Playlist 4.2.3 to now publish my iPod playlists, although I’ve got an AppleScript that can do it too. Looks like version 5.0 has been a while in coming.

• Every time I try iWork, I like it. But I so rarely use it, it’s not worth buying. (Yet.)

• I like JDarkRoom, a full-screen simple text editor. The fonts are great, it’s easy to write in… but I don’t use it very often anymore. It is a great creative writing tool, something to really focus you down on what you’re doing. It’s also readable from across the room. (Perhaps I’m just shy? I bet that comes as a surprise.) GLTerminal has more old-skool cred with the flicker and arc, but JDarkRoom is a clean, straightforward app.

• I have a PowerBook with a motion sensor. I therefore have MacSaber. It’s inevitable. (It’s also been used exactly once.)

• MarsEdit, tool for offline posts to weblogs. I haven’t decided about this one - I haven’t even really tried out the trial version.

• OggDrop X, for converting OGG music files. I, uh, don’t use OGG anymore. Everything’s MP3 or AAC.

• OTR Proxy might see some use, if I ever IMed with someone who used it too.

• pearLyrics is still around, but I haven’t used it in ages.

• Stellarium, planetarium software. Sweet.

• Think is another one that I’m trying out that I’m not sure if I’m going to keep. It blacks out everything but what you’re working on, which is nice. A separate app to do it, though… I’m not sure about this one yet.

• VLC for those media files that Quicktime can’t hack. Haven’t had many of those.

Finally, we have the discard pile. These just weren’t for me, thank you, come again.

• Growl may come as a surprise for the die-hard Mac readers, because it’s an honestly good program and wildly popular. I’ve simplified my routine, though, and when I’m on my Mac I don’t need notifications about every little event. Mail arrives? I’ll get to it. New song plays? Okay, I’ll listen to it. This is definitely a “good, but not for me” program. <ploink>

• Seamonkey, Shiira, and SunriseBrowser were all deleted a while ago. <ploink ploink ploink>

• I tried out Flock and liked it well enough (Camino + Flickr + del.icio.us is a good combo) but got a little wigged out by the unknown TCP/IP traffic I saw going out of it. So: <ploink>

• Armagetron and Armagetron Advanced, Tron Cycle games. <ploink>

• Battle of Wesnoth, still great, I’m still not playing. <ploink>

• Browsejour. Why did I think I needed this? <ploink>

• Disk Inventory X. It was useful when I was searching my old drives. Done now. <ploink>

• Flickr Uploadr, er, uploads files to Flickr. Replaced with jUploader. <ploink>

• iPodDisk. I have a 512 MB first generation shuffle. I don’t need this app yet. <ploink>

• IPScanner. Never used it. <ploink>

• MyTunesRSS. Great idea, not for me. <ploink>

• NeoOffice, the OpenOffice.org port to OS X. A 350+ MB app is not a utility. No need, so: <ploink ploink>

• Yahoo Widgets, too much memory required. I’ll use them on my Windows machine, but not on my Mac. <ploink>

• XJournal, offline posting for LiveJournal. Don’t use LJ, so no need for this one. <ploink>

• XNmap. Never used it. <ploink>

Next up, I’ll have to document my love affair with the command line.

(Most everyone reading this already knows that I can read really fast: really, really fast when the occasion calls for it. Scanning news is one of those things.)

Camino handled the load far better than Safari did, letting me page through posts quickly, if not as fast as I might like. There’s only so much one can do to cut through all the AJAXy overhead. I grow less fond of AJAX with each passing day. I may soon find myself using AJAX in the same way Merrystar uses Flash — avoid, disable, and enable only when absolutely required.

The only drawback with the Safari → Camino switch is an aesthetic one: small Helvetica type isn’t weighted as nicely in Gecko browsers as it is in Safari, particularly at the lighter weights and smaller sizes. (Sub-10pt italic seems particularly affected.) Also, the line height seems to be crowded in text blocks, so that words seem crowded in a paragraph. It’s very subtle, but I’m known to be picky about my fonts.

(The partial solution is a simple ⌘+ to increase the font size, which makes the web a nicer place to browse anyway. The line height is still awkward, but less distracting than before. It’s still not as good as Safari.)

I’m happy to say that Camino really is chugging along well, and I may keep Safari off the dock and in reserve for specialized tasks. But it’s probably too early to see if there’s a significant difference.

But, back to the apology. The downside of this web browsing is that I’ve been hitting my del.icio.us links pretty hard, and the next post is likely to be pretty big.

Hopefully, you’ll find something interesting in amidst it all.