Apple vs Microsoft OS behaviours

I mentioned when I first switched that I’ve been a closet Apple fanboy for years, I was just waiting for a good enough excuse to buy a mac. All that time I was never able to put a finger on why I enjoyed macs so much, but after four months full time I think I’ve worked it out.

I still use XP on my windows box regularly for games, but last week had to boot up the Vista partition. As I tried for countless minutes to achieve something useful while the system had a mild heart attack doing whatever it is that Vista does, I finally realised what was wrong.

The difference between Apple and Microsoft is that when you’re using an Apple OS, the user comes first. No ifs, no buts, if the user wants something it uses all the available resources to serve that request. Everything feels snappy even in low memory environments (and even on a phone!). Applications, particularly Apple applications, are designed to be secondary and subservient to the user.

Microsoft on the other hand make operating systems where it, along with the applications, rule. You can only guide them. Vista, and to a lesser extent XP, cares only about itself. Sure it might put on a pretty face and try to make you feel like you’re in control, but under the hood it doesn’t care one iota what you want. It’s so busy trying to anticipate and pre-cache your next action, index your documents, swap out that application you just minimised even though you might need it in 2 minutes, and countless other background tasks, that the user winds up with a sluggish experience and a frustrating lack of control over the system.

Having used windows for over 10 years, I can look back and see that this “system > user” philosophy has always been hiding under the surface. You just never really notice unless you’re looking for it or the OS requirements jump higher than the average computer power at the time. Microsoft have really painted themselves into a corner with all of the enterprise requirements and backwards compatibility weighing them down.

Apple, on the other hand, have years of user-centric development behind them. Even though they’re starting to pander to enterprise customers, if the iPhone 2.0 demos are anything to go by the addition of enterprise features in 10.6 won’t compromise the end user experience.

Maybe Microsoft will pull something out of their hat, but it’s going to take even more to make me switch back now that my eyes are open.

 

Finding myself some office software

I’ve held out for a while, but last month reached the point where I need some kind of word processor & spreadsheet software. I use MS Office at work, but have always considered it too expensive for use at home as I don’t need much.

On my Windows box, I had been forcing myself to use Open Office. It worked, but that was about all; I hate the interface, it doesn’t hold a candle to MS Office. It was actually one of the first things I tried when I started using this Mac - and it was an utter mess, barely even able to load.

Office for Mac 2008 didn’t fare much better. I’ve had some exposure to it from the mac users at work, and what I’ve seen is not only yet another Microsoft interface that I would have to puzzle my way around, the memory it used on a decent machine indicated it would absolutely kill this poor little 512mb laptop.

The A$650 price, and reviews like this one from MacInTouch (particularly the memory usage section), sealed that deal.

I decided to put up with nothing, but that didn’t last long. When the need hit last month, a few searches lead me to iWork 08. I’d never looked into it beyond the initial reviews, but thankfully it has a 30 day trial.

I’m now hooked

It has taken me a few weeks, but my needs at home are so basic that I’ve quickly adapted to the iWork interface. The only thing that gave me grief is border styling in Numbers, but I think I’m getting the hang of it.

It’s a different and far more basic approach to Office application design, but one that focuses on making document creation easy rather than cramming itself full of features. Fairly typical of Apple software, really

The biggest win, in my eyes, is the memory usage. I still haven’t lost the amazement of running Safari, iTunes and Mail at the same time on 512mb ram without any noticable system lag. Apple have taken the same philosophy with their Office apps, and I couldn’t be happier.

The only time it starts lagging is when I leave Safari + Mail open and run both Pages and Numbers with large documents. Even so, it wasn’t until I upgraded to 2gb ram that my Windows box was happy with that much running.

I just… I’m sold. All this for around 15% of the cost of MS Office.

 

Europeans found their voice

The European public has proved they are a dangerous force to be reckoned with. After a very successful education campaign, the Lisbon Treaty is dead.

EU leaders in Brussels and governments across the union, particularly Germany and France, were stunned by the Irish verdict, which amounted to a huge vote of no confidence in the way the EU is run.

Amusingly the guardian is reporting that some parts of the EU are still trying to find a loophole:

Everything suggested that Europe’s key leaders were urgently conferring on a scheme to steamroller their blueprint through despite the Irish rejection, a course likely to trigger protest from Eurosceptics and deepen Europe’s democratic legitimacy problems.

Sounds like they already have pretty serious democratic legitimacy problems if they’re still trying to push through a document that is so obviously unpopular with the citizens they represent. It can’t be a very good idea with their next election only a year away.

On the plus side, I’m no longer worried about sounding crazy in my post a few days ago. Enough of the Irish thought we were right to vote no

 

That’s enough essays for a while

I think 3 huge posts in the space of a week is enough. It’s not that I had them built up from a month of silence, I’ve just had a lot to say about topics that came up recently

And just because I don’t want to make a new post about it, some fun news.

I noticed as I wrote my Awaken post last night that the MacHeist front page had changed to “coming soon”, and this morning I woke up to two new software keys sitting in my inbox! It turns out that the fantastic MacHeist bundle I picked up in April has been re-released with three new apps, and because it’s the same price they managed to extend the deal for existing bundle purchasers. The new apps make it even more of a steal:

• VectorDesigner (woot I don’t own any OSX graphic tools)
• TextExpander (read about this on DaringFireball, didn’t want to pay full price)
• SoundStudio (if it gets unlocked)

The bundle is packed full of useful stuff, particularly for new OS X users. I haven’t tried the new apps yet but out of the others I use them all except for:

• The games (they’re old and obviously released into the bundle as advertising, Enigmo was one of the games ported to iPhone for the WWDC 08 keynote)
• iClip (it’s sluggish on 512mb ram)
• DEVONthink (I’ve been looking for an excuse to use it though)

So by the time I buy a new mac, I’ll be using every app except the games. Even if you’re not a new mac user, for my money there are some very handy tools (CoverSutra, Awaken, XSlimmer, WriteRoom) that don’t have any good free equivalent and would cost more than the $50 bundle price just by themselves. VictorDesigner and SoundStudio are both worth more than the bundle price alone, so if you can make use of either one it becomes a no-brainer.

And to top it all off $12 of your money will go to charity. Pick it up now to help guarantee SoundStudio for everyone

 

A crash course in MythTV backend setup

I’ve had a MythTV box running for quite a few years now, but there’s always new things to learn, right?

My flatmate’s TV is in for repairs so we haven’t been using the box in the last few days, with a big NRL game on tonight it was supposed to be recording. I became concerned when the drive light wasn’t flashing as we ate dinner, a quick check of the web interface set my alarm bells ringing. Nothing was recording, and in fact nothing had been recording for nearly 2 days.

The time of failure co-incided with a machine lockup while we were trying to watch TV over the network (it’s saved as MPG so this is easy to do). With no TV screen I hadn’t verified that MythTV was working after the reboot, only that the SMB shares were alive. Visions of dead hard drives floated into my head as much frantic searching and diagnosis ensued

The problem turned out to be very subtle, this explanation may get a bit technical but I couldn’t find any references to it on google so hopefully this post will be useful to someone else.

I only have one machine, but the log clearly said “Running as a slave backend“. Therein lies the problem, the Master server thought it was a Slave backend and sat there trying to connect to nothing. This means no scheduled recordings either because scheduling is all handled by the Master server

MythTV is amazingly flexible. It handles multiple backend recording machines, each with multiple capture cards, as well as multiple frontends. Unfortunately a very flexible system easily leads to a lot of configuration complexity, a fact I know all to well from my time in ELJ support.

After browsing around various forms and mailing lists for nearly half an hour I ended up in the Configuring MythTV docs. If you scroll down to the general section, you’ll see some confusing paragraphs:

If you will be deploying multiple backends, or if your backend is on one system and you’re running the frontend on another machine then do not use the “127.0.0.1″ IP address.

NOTE: If you modify the 127.0.0.1 address and use a “real” IP address, you must use real IP addresses in both fields, otherwise your frontend machines will generate “Unexpected response to MYTH_PROTO_VERSION” errors.

To understand that, you have to understand that everything in MythTV land is controlled by a single MySQL server. Both the Backend and Frontend sofware connect to the database, read config settings for their hostname (they’re designed to netboot on diskless machines) and then read the global Master Server IP to connect to.

I don’t know why this option exists, but one of those per-host config settings is a Backend Server IP.

And suddenly it hit me.

A week ago, I downloaded MythFrontend for OS X. This poor little iBook is too slow to actually watch TV, but before I discovered that it was the first time I had run a remote frontend so I had to change a few things to make it work. One of those was the Master Server IP.

Since this had been set to 127.0.0.1, the frontend couldn’t connect to the Master Server so I changed it to the Master Server’s network IP. The frontend worked, everything else seemed fine, so I thought nothing of it. Until the Server rebooted.

It turns out that when the Backend loads up, it compares Backend Server IP it has been assigned to the Master Server IP. If they match it loads as the Master; otherwise it becomes a slave. Apparently, it doesn’t bother to figure out that the Master Server IP is the same machine as the 127.0.0.1 it has been told it owns. Isn’t this option redundant? Can’t the Backend just check if it owns the Master Server IP when it already listens on all interfaces?

So long story short, if you mess with the MasterServerIP in your database make sure you also update the BackendServerIP listed in the settings for your Master Server’s hostname. ugh.

On the plus side, I think half an hour to fix a problem this subtle in configuration settings that I had no clue existed is a new record for me

 

Vanity search fail

Like most bloggers, I have feeds set up to keep track of when people link to me. I logged into WP this evening to fix some formatting in my last post, and on the dashboard I noticed my stats graph had a spike in traffic last week (I don’t usually pay much attention to my stats). I couldn’t see any recent links on the vanity search, I had to use referrer logs to track it down - turns out someone created a TinyURL link to my time machine post:
http://tinyurl.com/29gx75

Obviously it would be a lot harder for Google and Technorati to index those links, and given the rise of TinyURL on twitter they may not even want to. I just thought it was interesting, and possibly something to keep in mind for anyone doing vanity searches.

Incidentally the link was posted to a couple of comment threads, you can see the list on google (skip the artisopensource link, it’s some kind of spam or hack site). I guess I should finish writing that follow up article, the time machine post has overtaken my Firefox iFrame popup post to become the second most popular post on my blog

 

Using Awaken to solve SuperDuper sleepiness

I’ve written before about how I’m doing nightly SuperDuper! backups as part of my backup strategy. It’s a great piece of software, but in order to maintain backwards compatibility the developers are still using cron instead of launchd. This caused me no end of headaches setting up a rotating backup system, but there is one huge drawback I wasn’t able to work around - the inability to force the machine to wake from sleep (cron won’t run tasks while the mac is asleep).

For a while I just told my Mac to stop sleeping, but that’s a waste when on weekdays it sits idle for 2/3 of the day. I finally settled on a 2 hour sleep timer, but with the recent Age of Conan release the Mac has managed to be asleep at backup time more often than not.

It was on the way home today that the solution to SuperDuper’s narcolepsy finally hit me. I picked up Awaken back in April as part of a MacHeist bundle, and after a few teething problems with Growl I’ve been going to sleep and waking up to my music. Awaken makes full use of launchd and will happily wake the system up, so all I had to do was set an alarm a couple of minutes before the backup that didn’t play music

It was while setting this up that another flash of brilliance hit me. Awaken’s silent alarm requires a task to launch, it can’t be empty. So I figured, what better task than a script to quit Awaken since it was only loading to wake the mac from sleep :D

After playing with Automator and discovering that by default launching a workflow will edit it instead of run it (seems pretty stupid to me, but hey I’m a windows user at heart) I finally figured out how to make it work.

Awaken isn’t free, but if you do own it I present to you the final list of instructions:

In Automator:

• Create a new custom Automator workflow
• Under Utilities, drag Quit Application across to the workflow
• Pick Awaken from the Application list, and untick Ask to save changes
• Save the workflow somewhere useful

In Finder:

• Locate the workflow you just saved
• Click on it and type cmd+i (or file -> get info)
• Under Open With, change it to Automator Runner (don’t hit change all)

You now have an Automator workflow file that when opened, will quit Awaken instead of bringing up the Automator edit view. To edit it later, you either have to manually load it into Automator or right click -> open with -> Automator.

Then, in Awaken:

• In general preferences, ensure Wake Mac from sleep is checked (if it isn’t, you need to let your mac sleep. It gets tired, you know.)
• Create a new alarm, give it a title, set occurrence and time to a minute or so before your backup
• Set type to task
• Drag your workflow into the Launch Item section

I’m really happy with this setup. It would be better if SuperDuper! supported this out of the box, but now that I’ve realised I can use Awaken as my own personal interface to launchd a whole world of possibilities are coming to mind

 

Has Europe gone crazy too?

(I’m probably going to come across as a nutjob after my rant a couple of posts ago and now this. All I can say is, either I spend too much time listening to Adam Curry or the rest of the world is too lazy to care about what their politicians are doing to them. In a world that cares so much about human rights, I’ve seen no complaints about the rights that are going to be taken away.)

Two years ago, the European Constitution was blocked. This obviously annoys the politicians backing it, so what do they do? They create the “Lisbon Treaty”, bypassing the need for citizens to approve it, and use it to say “take the constitution document that the citizens blocked, add this stuff to it, and pass it without asking them”.

At first this claim sounds like paranoid conspiracy delusions but it’s all backed up with research and links to the documents. Have a go, try to read the Treaty - as soon as you hit the meat on page 10 you see that it’s nothing but amendments to the constitution document.

Oh and here’s a bunch of politcians opposed to passing the Lisbon Treaty without a public vote as far back as July last year:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVeMBNB0cII

Once again I’m linking to a Daily Source Code podcast, episode 764 this time. Start around 12 minutes, when Adam begins with some background (eg some EU countries have already ratified this) that is interesting but takes a while to get rolling. He then spends a full 10 minutes quoting from the document some points I have copied below, adding his interpretation in plain english examples. Now obviously there are no lawyers to confirm his statements but most of the implications are fairly obvious.

I highly recommend taking in the full 20 minute rant. I know I haven’t had much success in making any of my readers listen to stuff like this in the past, and if you don’t live in Europe you may not care, but hey at least I tried.

So here’s the articles that Adam quoted. The first point in each list is the article proper (the only bit you’re supposed to read) followed by the fine print added in an amendment. Each time it’s negated to the point where this is starting to sound like a police state.

• No death penalty, you have a right to life.
• If someone attacks a police officer, resists arrest, or is participating in a riot or insurrection, depravation of life is not illegal
• States can enact the death penalty during time of war or imminent threat of war

• Everyone has the right to liberty and security of person
• Except that minors can be detained for the purpose of educational supervision
• Except that you can be detained if you spread infectious diseases, are “of unsound mind”, are an alcoholic, drug addict or vagrant

• Freedom of expression and information, right to hold and impart information and ideas
• Excercising this freedom is subject to formalities, conditions, restrictions and penalties as is “necessary in a democratic society”. An example of when the freedom can be taken away:
  • Prevention of disorder
  • In the interest of national security
  • The protection of health or morals
  • Prevention of disclosing information received in confidence

This all goes into effect January 1st, and the only way it can be stopped is if Ireland’s referendum on the 12th of June blocks it. There is no way any other citizen in the European Union can stop it, because it’s a treaty that must be simply “ratified” rather than holding a referendum. In fact the only reason it can be stopped at all is because Ireland is the only EU country with enough independence to mandate a referendum for it.

I don’t know what else to say, other than I hope the people of Ireland understand what they’re letting themselves in for before they vote on this one. Unfortunately the entire document seems designed to avoid that, making it so complicated that people just vote yes.

 

The celebrations didn’t quite go as planned

After a busy day of merging and releasing, the release build of 6.4 popped out of our build machine around mid afternoon. I went to break out the beer only to discover that the fridge had died at some point during the day and the beer was all warm

 

I still have some hope for America

Sometimes I wonder if America’s gone crazy. Luckily, there are still some sane people around and listening to those that are speaking out on podcasts says to me that eventually enough people will pay attention and they will start waking up the general public. The influence of Ron Paul over the internet generation certainly proved to me that it’s starting to happen. In any case, here are a couple of examples.

I nearly blogged about a lengthy rant from Dave Slusher when I heard it, but I slacked off and eventually forgot about it until today. At the time, I wondered why I wasn’t hearing more people speaking their mind about America’s political situation (maybe you hear it more often if you’re actually in America).

This morning I started listening No Agenda’s latest episode, and the way they talk about the stupid things going on in the world in an honest way reminded me of Dave’s rant - showing a clear passion for their country and utter disbelief at what’s happening to it. I find that No Agenda gives me the real interesting news coming out of America, with opinions that actually have half a brain behind them.

Topics I enjoyed in this week’s episode:

• privatised jails leading to luxury jails where celebs pay for comfortable cells
• why are we paying US$120 a barrel for oil while shell sits back and makes crazy amounts of money
• canola is a manufactured oil, anyone talking about canola plants is talking out of their arse
• A juicy rumor that the music business is considering a new model, advertising in music videos

Now I’ve talked about both shows before, but nobody’s ever given me feedback about listening to ‘em and quite frankly, I’m not surprised. Predominately talk shows aren’t everyone’s cup of tea.

The thing about No Agenda in particular is that you need to get past the episode length. Don’t be scared by the fact that each episode is between 60 and 100 minutes; nobody has that much time to sit around listening to a podcast. No Agenda, to me, is like a great background radio show. I put it on and continue with what I’m doing. Anything from walking home to writing a blog post (yes, I’m listening to it while writing this). Occasionally something they say will catch my attention and I refocus for a bit, or rewind if I only pick up on it in the middle of a conversation. The point is you don’t need to listen to the whole thing. There are no ads or music so it’s literally just eavesdropping on a couple of tech geeks chatting (except they actually want you to listen).

This all sounds like a waste of time; but the benefits you gain from catching the pieces that really interest you are very much worth it. Particularly if you’re like me, not an American and often wondering WTF is up with those silly people. Here’s two Americans wondering the same thing, and because they are American they’re often more informed on the topics. This leads to some very interesting opinions and discussion; not limited to Americans either but often news coming out of the UK as well.

Apparently No Agenda is generating quite a large audience, and many of them don’t know why they listen (this was mentioned a week or two ago). I think I’ve figured out why - they take the news of the week and apply proper, down to earth reasoning to it rather than the sugar coated crap that comes out of the mainstream news channels.

It’s addictive because it’s so refreshing for anyone paying attention and actually giving a crap about the state of the world.