one gig is not enough

Apple history OSX technology

Thirteen years ago I worked for the first time on a SGI computer. “Super Computer” as it’s owners liked to call it whenever they could. They spent more than you would pay for mid sized house on it’s memory alone. It had 1GB RAM. Telling people casually about this machine back in the day I had to emphasize: No, not the hard drive, the RAM is one Gigabyte. There were a handful of computers of this size in Germany back in the day.

Yesterday I saw somebody beach-ball on a MacBook. She just uses it for the normal communication things you do these days, no ‘heavy’ applications. This computer had the same memory size: one Gigabyte. And it is not enough. The machine was swapping. Horribly slow.

Something is a bit odd here: Using one gigabyte you could store one million pages of text. Or one thousand books with a thousand pages each. Or you could fill the screen of the laptop with 350 layers of images. 349 of them being invisible.

Memory is cheap these days. But wasting a whole GB is something that might
lead to the wasting a whole 16GB in a few years. That memory one could use probably for real useful things as well.

open terminal here

Apple OSX

opens terminal in directory of finder window

To open your current working directory from the terminal in the finder simply type:

open .

That is open “dot”, which you can replace with other valid file names. Works with other files as well. Pretty much does what would happen if you would click on the thing. In unix a . is the current directory

change name: no you don’t

Apple OSX

Apple’s XCode comes free with your operating system. It allows you to compile code. But is it a decent Development API? I highly doubt so. I don’t spend 50 hours a week with it. I hope nobody has too. I wasted the last thirty minutes of my life trying to find a way to rename a project. Just giving it a new name. Not more not less. I truly sucks. This is probably not a bug, just some ridicolous user interface disaster. XCode. It truly sucks, and, isn’t that a coincidence, there is no real alternative to it.

now that apple sells lots of stuff

Apple malware OSX

they think can take a stroll on the dark side

Idiots. How often can you sell your virginity? Now Apple has marched into the ‘phone home’ camp. And for what benefit? Idiots.

where is that file?

Apple OSX

Looking for a specific file that I had modified today.
This did the trick in the terminal:


mdfind -onlyin ~/ 'kMDItemFSContentChangeDate > $time.today'

Spotlight is great, just that it’s standard interface is lame. Pretty much unusuable.
But there is always the terminal …

cheap end

Apple confessions of a pixel pusher OSX

no new features, but a new price: 500 US$ for shake

Apple should put old stuff into the public domain. That would help build trust.

Apple is lately a bit distracted: If you pay 150 US$ more to get a Macbook in black you still get a white power supply.
That would be normal way for Dell and all the others. But Apple is about the details. Having a white power supply feeding your 150US$ more black laptop might be acceptible in emergencies, but selling it like this is very lame.

What happened? Did they present to Steve Jobs running on a battery at all times? This is the kind of thing that he is famous for: Attention to detail. I wonder how this could escape him. What is he doing?

MacBook Pro: Don’t get one

Apple OSX

The brief history of my OS X laptops:
Titanium 15 inch (thanks Jerry)
It’s hinge broke, as they do.
15″ Al was not out yet, so I got a 12″ Al. Small, fast and hot.
15″ Al then at some point. Very nice. Actually nicest laptop I ever had I think.
Leaving job and therefor Laptop behind.

With the looming Intel transistion ahead I got an iBook G4. Maybe that is the nicest laptop I ever had? The keyboard is somewhat noise and the screen somewat small. But apart from that I like it. Stays cool, white plastic not as fragile as the Al shell.

Two weeks before the MacBook came out I had to get a MacBook Pro. It’s pretty as the PowerBook was. But it’s actually annoying. I kept the iBook G4. Have them both with me. Weapon of choice: iBook G4 in 80% of all cases. The MacBook Pro get’s hot. It makes horrible noises. One seems to be the drive or heatpump and then there is that CPU! Disabling the second core via CHUD tools does indeed get rid of it. But isn’t it that I just bought a V8 just to disable it down to a 4 cylinder? Very annoying. And this machine gets ridicolously hot.

Ever since the broken hinge days I know that Apple will never own up design flaws. At least not as long they are common.
I am not sure about the MacBook as an alternative: The glossy screen is nothing that I would like, and they seem to have a very annoying edge around their body. Where your palms would rest.

os x: copy fails after 4gb

Apple confessions of a pixel pusher OSX

When copying a huge file to a drive you could see OS X freak out with a cryptic error messages. Around the lines of “Copy of file XYZ failed with error -NUMBER”.

One possible reason is that the target drive (maybe a shuttle one) is formated as “MS DOS” not as “OS X Journaled”.
Command-I when having the drive selected will tell you.
The file size during that error message is up on the screen will be pretty exactly 4GB. When you close the error then the file will be gone. Of course nothing get’s logged in the system log. Not sure if the finder has a log.

OS X: great unix. Kinda …

five years

Apple M$ OSX technology

OS X is out since five years

Almost as long as Vista is delayed.

I think that the PS3 and Vista will both come out together: Never. They share the sickness of the incumbent king. Too fat and saturated to really move. Sony is dreaming about 100 Million PS3 sold, only because they did so with PS1 & 2. And likewise Microsoft thinks that everybody will have to have Vista. Both are in for a surprise.

The same patterns can be found elsewhere: Google Video is not really amazing. It’s outright lame. Google is the incumbent search engine. Not their core business sucks yet. But new launches like Video or base or personal pages are less than great.

os x: no /dev/mt/tps0d1 or /dev/nst0 for you!

Apple confessions of a pixel pusher OSX

Apple tells us since years whenever it feels approiate that OS X is based on unix. They are not lying of course. But there are some nasty details. One that drives me crazy right now:

Since it’s beginnings unix always supported tape drives. All of them, sometimes there were updates needed etc etc.
But data management via data tapes was always a thing that just worked. On every unix flavor I know. Actually it worked pretty much the same and usually is very reliable once you are a couple of months away of the bleeding edge and if you don’t have to battle broken hardware.

OS X is different: The parts that make tape archiving work have been removed. OS X is the only unix system where this happened. The hardware is there and it works. The software was there and it works. Just that Apple decided “No Tapes for you”. Which is super lame.

On one side Apple wants to be in the pro market. With XSan they like to become a storage vendor, and on the
other side they cripple the operating system by not creating /dev/mt/tpsXdY or /dev/nstX devices.

This is nothing less than Microsoftesc. It really is lame to break working things, just because you have decided that a couple of tape archiving software vendors is more important than the pro market. No, I can not use “retrospect” to manage a Peta Byte for the the movie that I am working on right now. The linux boxes doing the job would have not moved into this Apple heavy environment if Apple would not have broken OS X. To me OS X is only 95% unix and 5 % got soaked in Koolaid and fell apart. Tape device support is some of that. What a shame.