Jeremey's Weblog

Snow Leopard!

I upgraded to Snow Leopard yesterday, and it is fantastic. Noticeably snappier in every respect. The Exchange 2007 support is great, it took a while to initially sync all my mail (mass quantities), but after that it has been singing along. Address Book integration is nicely done, it doesn't try to merge, it keeps your accounts separated, but provides an All Contacts view. GAL search works too (and in mail compose).

Snow Leopard comes with 64-bit Java 6 out of the box, woohoo! I loathe Java, but as I'm working with it now, I am very grateful for the massive speed upgrade, and the JDK 6 support.

I installed MySQL 5.1 x86_64 and it runs perfectly. The PrefPane is 32-bit and requires an (automatic) relaunch of System Preferences, but that's no big deal, it is used infrequently.

*Everything* is faster. So far the only casualty is Checkpoint SecureClient, which I knew in advance.

Good stuff, Apple!

OH!! I also got back almost 15G of HD space! LOVE.

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apple, snow leopard

M7 Edit in XP in VMWare on MacBook Pro

This is one of my Spaces on my MBP right now (VMWare in full screen mode).

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yamaha, m7, pro audio

6G FTW!

So... I upgraded the RAM in my Mac Pro from 2G to 6G (for $157!!) and the difference is incredible. Aperture used to be pretty lame on the performance front, now it screams (upgrading to 2.x helped some too). Really, it screams... the extra 4G totally transformed the experience of using my machine.

I'm running all of my normal apps, plus Aperture, plus Photoshop CS3, and I don't notice any sluggishness.

RAM is cheap. Go buy some!

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aperture, apple, photography

Air Thoughts

The Air is exactly what I want in a laptop. I don't understand people who are complaining about it. OK, if you want a desktop-replacement laptop, guess what... this isn't it!

I almost never use my optical drive on my G4 Powerbook... the only times I've used it in the last year+ were times when I could easily have used Remote Disc.

I don't use wired networking on my laptop. I almost never use USB, so one port is sufficient for me.

My Powerbook already functions as an Air, only much slower, much bigger, and much heavier. Seems pretty obvious to me.

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apple, macbook air

Leopard Desktop Sharing

This is very cool. When browsing your network, you can just click on a Mac and click "Share Screen", and up it comes (with appropriate auth, of course). Looks like VNC to me... maybe the screen sharing client will talk to any VNC server?

In any case, here's my laptop inside my 30" desktop:

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apple, macosx, leopard

Leopard: Better In Every Way

Now that the irritating upgrade issues and concomitant Internet outage are over, Leopard is a truly beautiful thing. It is better in every way I can think of, and a lot of ways I wouldn't have thought of (e.g. the new active vs. inactive window UI decorations). The new features that I've used so far actually add a lot of value (Quick Look, Spaces, Cover Flow). The amazing thing is that the whole system is noticeably faster, everything is very snappy. More later, but I thought I'd say something more positive after the upgrade story.

My Leopard Upgrade: Tale of Woe

My last 12 hours has been Internet and OS Hell. Comcast blew a gasket last night and our service was down for 12+ hours. In the meantime, I tried to upgrade to Leopard. The upgrade was flawless, except for two little tiny things, which caused the whole experience to be very painful.

At least one of them is Apple's fault, the second is arguable. Anyway, here goes...

The tale begins last night, at the mall, which closes at 9, but the Apple store remained open until 10, per their Leopard release party plans. We had other commitments, so I arrive at the mall at 9:50 or so. Doors are locked. WTF? A security guard comes to the door to let someone else out and asks if I'm an Apple employee, I say no, I'm a customer, and he says the mall is closed. I say the store is open. He says the mall is closed. It so happens that at that moment, I'm on the phone with an Apple employee in the store, to ask them to come open the door, and finally the guard decides not to be an a-hole and lets me in.

I buy Leopard and I get a t-shirt and I leave.

We get home... no Internet. I call the old Roadrunner tier-3 tech support number (I have a commercial account), it's not the same anymore, it goes directly to hold, no idea if anyone will answer. OK, fine, I call 1-800-COMCAST... on hold, for 45 minutes. Finally I get someone... I tell them the situation, they give me the commercial support number (yay). I call... after 4 levels of menus, I get connected to a human. There's an outage. No ETA. Great.

In the meantime, I clean up my HD and pop the Leopard DVD in. I click install. It restarts and the installer comes up... great. Something is working. I click continue and it gives me a list of drives to choose from for the install. My main drive isn't listed. WTF!

OK, possible problems... I have 2 internal drives... no idea why it only sees one, the one that I don't boot from. But if I remove that one, it should see the other one, it would have to, right? Let's try it... nope. Doesn't see it. OK, disconnect both external drives, the printer, the abacus, the kitchen sink, etc. Restart... still doesn't see it!

Curse you, Leopard scum!!

Find Leopard box, dig out manual, look up support number... ready to call. Oh, wait... it finally sees it! But it's grayed out. This is weird... now it's not grayed out... it's there... I can click it... I'm saaaved!

Apparently, it was trying to calculate how much more space it would consume on my drive. You know what? I just don't give a crap. If you must waste time calculating that, could you please do something like TELL ME? So I don't disassemble my entire computer to see what the hell is making you be so stupid?

Oy. OK, Leopard installs, it's pretty quick, painless, etc. Restart. Apple logo. Blue screen. Blue screen. Blue screen. Oh, look, here's my mouse pointer. Blue screen. Time passes. Blue screen.

Curse you, Leopard scum!!

Call Apple support. "Greater than 15 minute wait time." Lovely. While on hold, dig out iPhone, to google this problem. Oh, wait, Internet still down.

Curse you, Comcast scum!!

Of course, my Wi-Fi is up, just the next hop isn't, so my phone doesn't know its efforts are futile... OK, disable Wi-Fi on the phone... now google...

Yep. Other people have this too. Apple doesn't know WTF the problem is. Nice. Ah... some light... it's APE extensions... Leopard can't finish booting because of APE extensions?!

Curse you, Unsanity scum!!

OK, I dunno whose fault it is, really, I'm just cursing everyone at this point. :)

Macfixit has instructions to fix. Single-user mode. rm -rf. Done. Reboot.

IT'S ALIVE!!!!

Leopard is gorgeous. Fast. Spaces is AWESOME. I love it.

...and... the 40D is supported! Woohoo! ROCK.

OK, I'm done.

The Awesome Awesomeness of iLife '08

I am blown away. Apple's update to its iLife suite of "digital lifestyle" apps is really, really good. And to go along with all the new hotness, .Mac subscribers now have 10G of space instead of just 1 (a very necessary improvement).

So I haven't been through all the apps but the new iPhoto is worth the upgrade by itself. It's ridiculously fast and has a number of seemingly small features that really make a big difference. One is that double-clicking on a thumbnail now gets you an instant zoomed view of the image rather than edit mode. Another is the new events feature, which visually catalogues your images by event instead of just by roll or date. It means you can keep each of your events collapsed into one thumbnail and easily get to it as needed (instead of the sea of photos approach taken previously, though that is still available if you like).

There are two new features that stand out though... the first (which goes along with the events view) is "scrubbing". In your events view, as you move the mouse across the thumbnail for an event, iPhoto shows you all the photos in the event... it changes the thumbnail temporarily to wherever your mouse is in the event. This allows you to find photos very quickly without even opening an event.

The second feature is the web gallery. The new web galleries are gorgeous, Apple has done a good job of using open source "web 2.0" components to build a really amazing web UI (see my gallery here). They've also added the ability to email photos into a gallery, which is very cool on the iPhone (Flickr has had this for a long time, but the .Mac web gallery is a much more manageable medium for most people, especially those with less tech savvy). I wouldn't send family members to my Flickr site, it's just too much... but I can send them to my .Mac gallery and I can easily keep it updated and it's simple and clean for them to visit and see updates.

Oh, and the web gallery... it does scrubbing too... very cool. Not to mention the carousel view. I could go on. I'm really impressed with the new photo stuff.

Frustrating note: iPhoto won't work with the web galleries right out of the box... once you've installed iLife '08, run software update and it'll fetch 7.0.1 (or greater) and things will work.

The only other app I've spent time in is iMovie, which looks so cool I'm tempted to go buy an HD camcorder just to play with it.

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apple, macosx, ilife

NetNewsWire

Well I've ditched endo in favor of NetNewsWire. With 3.0 it has a clean, simple interface and I've found that most things go unread in endo because of its design. As I subscribe to more and more feeds, the aggregated approach is losing its appeal, and I split my time between aggregated group views, all latest news, and individual subscriptions, which is where NNW beats the pants off endo.

The News from Lake Obiwan

I haven't really posted much lately, I think because I've had too many things to say, rather than not enough. I don't like to post unless I can do a topic justice. Oh well. So instead, here are my current musings across a wide range of topics, sure to do no justice to anything. You're just jealous.

Browsers

I tried Firefox for a week or two. Really, I tried. I really like Greasemonkey, at least in concept. I really like Adblock. I really like good "web 2.0" behavior. I just don't really like using Firefox. It's cumbersome and slow, compared to Safari. It feels rough and unfinished. The download dialog is atrocious. It's still using Carbon UI elements, which look... well, atrocious. The "what do I do with this thing I downloaded for you?" dialog is the worst. It's just clunky and poorly integrated. Sigh. None of the other Firefox-based browsers are worth mentioning, they are either buggy or featureless. Safari it is (and Safari does color profiles... it drives me nuts that Firefox doesn't).

Coffee

We saw Black Gold, the movie. Go see this movie right now if you possibly can. If you drink coffee. It's really good and really important. Basically, coffee farmers get screwed massively. We can help this by buying at least fair trade coffees (Fair Trade Certified), but even better, buy from roasters who give a crap and buy direct from farmers, building relationships and so on. Intelligentsia is a good one, but there are a bunch. Counter Culture Coffee is another. You get much better beans that way, too.

Photography

I'm really burned out on "nature photography" these days. I'm tired of the cacophony of glowing comments about someone's latest flower pics on Flickr. Let me be blunt: almost anyone can walk up to a flower and not screw up the photo, ok? Cameras these days are pretty smart and flower pics from a point and shoot kicked up a little in iPhoto or Photoshop look amazing. So get over it! What challenge was there in taking a snapshot of a beautiful flower? Showing up at the right time of day (maybe)? That constitutes art?

Not for me. I'm so bored with snapshots, even good ones made with expensive equipment. Even my photo of North Window is boring me... I worked hard to get to the spot where I could take that shot, but beyond that, all I had to do was not screw it up. How hard is that?

I really like creating a photograph. Creating the light, scultping it, etc. For example, my recent portrait stuff... (see my photo blog) none of that light was there until I put it there. That to me is creativity.

That's not to say that all nature photographs are uncreative, far from it. But what most people pass off as "nature photography" is more like "I don't know how to take pictures of anything else photography", myself included. But that's changing, for me.

Odyssey

We got a new Honda Odyssey and the Honda Musiclink kit for iPod integration... woohoo! I vowed never to buy another car without iPod integration, so I kept my word (whew). This one isn't ideal, but it's leaps better than before. The iPod plugs into a dock cable (say, in your glove box) and you get steering wheel control over the current playlist. No playlist switching or song text displayed, though. It sounds fantastic, too. What irks me is they could have done the text thing and just didn't. And they could've used disc switching buttons for playlist navigation, or something. Maybe the tune knob. Anyway... it's good. Goodbye hated FM adapter.

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