• Can't connect to my DNS-323.. the shares show up, but when I click on them, I get an error message, even if I'm logged in as the right user. Some claim new DNS software fixes this, but it used to work in Leopard, so I blame Apple.
• Sometimes I lose my keyboard on reboots. Have to unplug/replug. It's just a standard Microsoft Natural keyboard. I mean come on! Don't tell me everyone at apple uses those flat aluminum things.
• When I come out of screen saver, I see my desktop, then it goes blue, then it fades to my desktop again, then it goes blue again, then it fades to my desktop again, then it goes blue, until I hit a key on the keyboard. Not sure what's going on but 10.6.2 didn't fix it.

Sometimes other random weird shit happens, but those are the most reproducible.

The only difference with Linux is that, I trust Apple to fix most of these things eventually. With Linux, I'd have to dick around for hours and fix shit myself.

But really, is this how software is done these days? Was getting SL out before Win7 really that worth it?

On the performance front, I'm very pleased. 4GB seems plenty for light usage (even with a small VM), and having enough RAM makes me almost not notice that I only have a 5400rpm drive. I'll get around to the SSD upgrade some day (maybe when Intel SSD prices are no longer jacked up due to low availability), and knowing that 8GB is supported makes me thing this machine will definitely last a while. Graphics seem pretty good, though I don't do anything in my daily routine to really test it. Fullscreen HD or whatever seems fine. We'll see what happens when SC2 comes out, but my backup plan is still to build a mini cheap PC to play that.

Purchased the mac mini with my friend's 15% discount. Turns out, I was speccing it wrong, so I saved an extra $70 or so from what I was expecting. $808 total including tax. Now I just have to get the SSD, and maybe a FW800 drive.

I managed to hook up my older mini to the tv, to use as a htpc. Loaded hulu desktop, but it seems like the cpu's not quite up to snuff to play the hulu videos. Why the hell does hulu require a c2d 2.0ghz?

Here are the contenders this time around: a new Mac Pro, a new core i7 build, upgrade the current build with a ssd and a gpu, or a new mac mini.

Cost-wise, the mac pro is the most expensive, and the the ssd+gpu upgrade to my current machine is the cheapest.

Out of these options, the mac mini is looking the most attractive. I think I'm ready again for a mostly integrated computing experience. (This probably has something to do with the fact that I don't have time to use my computer very much these days) I've been playing with a 2006-era mac mini at home for a while, and it meets all my needs except for graphics performance, disk performance, and it's lack of memory. Ok so I guess it doesn't really meet my needs.. that's why I've been using my PC most of the time.

The new mini can address all three of these areas. The Nvidia IGP is supposedly leaps and bounds better than the intel chip it replaces. I can buy a new model with 4gb of ram (enough for a vm), and reports on the web claim 8gb is possible. I also plan to throw an intel SSD in there, addressing the disk performance. For large capacity data storage, I'll just use an external firewire 800 drive, or do something over the network (unfortunately, osx still doesn't sport an iscsi initiatior).

I can't help but feel though, that this purchase is essentially going to be a sidegrade. That worries me somewhat.

The 2.53ghz c2d with 3M cache in the mini is going to be a slight downgrade from the e6600 (2.66ghz with 6M cache). I'm going to have less memory (4 vs 6) and the GPU is probably about the same (7600gt). Then again, the mini is a 1/20th of the size of my PC, but still, I certainly am not going to get a huge computational upgrade.

That's mostly fine, I think. Even if I went the core i7 route, I'd probably be at a quad core (which is mostly useless.. I never even exercise the 2 cores that I have now), and 8gb of ram (since the lynnfield mobo's only come with 4 slots, and 4gb dimm's are still expensive). Upgrading my current box isn't to yield that much improvement -- ssd will help, but gpu upgrade probably not much, since I don't really play any games.

I've done a few "side-grades" in the past. One was getting the Vaio 505 thin laptop model (went from a 350mhz P2, to a 366mhz mobile p2), and then the picturebook (which was a transmeta, and pretty much only slightly faster than the mobile p2). There was one more side-grade: when I bought the powerbook. I tried to make that laptop my primary environment, but it was definitely slower than the P4 desktop that I had been using up to that point.

Ok, so I've done this a lot in the past. And I kinda think I regretted it in some way each time. Many of the side-grade's were desktop-to-laptop moves though. This time will be a desktop-to-desktop move, and it will be a bit weird paying $1k for essentially the same capability in hardware.

That must really mean I want OSX. Why do I want OSX this time around? I think there are a few reasons. Support for exchange means I eventually shouldn't have to run a VM just to access work email (plus MS also claims to be writing a native exchange client.. though I don't trust their MacBU at all). I also want iMovie. Yea it's a crappy little movie program, but it's by far the most productive if you just want to take your flip videos and stitch them together and add a nice looking text title. These days, all the important stuff exists on the mac.. Lightroom, chrome, picasa, fusion, skype. This was definitely not true the last time I had a mac.

Reading some of my older posts reveals some past thinking that I should have just bought a mac pro instead of the current pc I have. Perhaps I will think the same after I buy the mini. This time I played a bit with the mini in the store, and I also have the experience of using this mini at home for a while.

I'd definitely be happy with the mac pro performance-wise.. but can I really justify the price of that thing? By my math, I'm paying almost $1000 extra for the equivalent hardware + OS (also, geforce gt120? really?). With the mini, I think the mark-up is somewhere around the 200-300 range. Plus, for a form-factor that's not available elsewhere. That's a bit easier to swallow. I also like the idea of having a machine that idles at 13W, since most of the time I won't be using it.

Also the whole crux of this plan is that i'm only spending $1k now, so in 2 years, I won't feel bad spending another $1k on something else if this was a mistake. A Mac Pro locks me in with a ~$2.5k purchase that I will have to make last for 4-5 years, like it or not. I'm just not that sure that the move to the mac will be a good one this time around.

Also, if starcraft 2 finally comes out, and the mini can't handle it, I'll probably always be able to put together a 500$ PC to play the damn game. Hopefully blizzard will just make the stupid game scale down well. I mean, I'm not buying a 3 year old machine for anything.

So yea, that's a bunch of blathering about nothing. I just write this down for myself so that I can read it later and try not to make the same mistakes.

Here's my stupid table I created from browsing through a bunch of Newegg listings for hard drives:

Model                   4+ 	1 egg   total

-----                   ----    ------  -----

barracuda lp 1tb        83%     8%      62

             1.5tb      64%     22%     55

             2tb        85%     9%      47

barracuda 7200.12 1tb   76%     13%     287    

                  500g  76%     16%     335

barracuda es.2          67%     13%     142

wd caviar black 1tb     87%     7%      1614

                0.5tb   90%     7%      736

wd re3          1.0tb   89%     8%      116  

wd green        1.0tb   85%     8%      1049

samsung f1   1.0tb      77%     14%     798

             0.5tb      89%     10%     96 

samsung f2 ecogreen 54  88%     7%      111

samsung f3 500gb        82%     8%      40

           1tb          80%     0%      19

hitachi 0a38016         77%     15%     628

First column is the model, obviously. Second column is the % of 4-egg and 5-egg reviews (generally positive reviews). The third column is the % of 1-egg reviews, which are generally where reports of DOA drives show up.

Conclusions? WD or Samsung = Good, Hitachi or Seagate = Not so much. Caviar Black series seems to have a good record. Latest seagates don't seem too hot. Samsungs also seem to do well, though there are a far fewer number of reviews there.

Here's the basic idea:

• At least one copy of each incoming email ends up in a non-inbox archive folder
• All important email goes to my inbox (but with a backup copy elsewhere)
• I delete emails out of my inbox when I'm "done" with them. Either I've finished the task that is related to a message, or I've replied, or I've just read it and decided that there's nothing further for me to do.
• I never delete emails out of my archive folders
• I use indexed search for everything else

My main mail system at work is Outlook, so here's how I implement this there:

• I have a few rules that filter out automated messages into their own folders (like commit messages from our VCS)
• I have rule that says "for a specific set of lists, put a copy of the message to the inbox-archive folder" and stop.
• I have another rule that says "for a different set of lists, move the message to a list-archive folder" and stop.
• Pretty much every rule has the "and stop" action so that the outlook will perform the action for the first match. The last rule is a catch-all, that says essentially make a copy of the message in my inbox-archive folder. I do this since if a rule hasn't matched already, then the message is going to end up in my inbox, so I need to make a copy of it

That's basically it. I have a similar scheme for gmail where I use archiving instead of deleting, but the idea is pretty much the same.

Things I like about this scheme:

• If it's not in my inbox, I don't have to worry about it
• No big complex set of rules I need to maintain
• I can perform the basic operations from all mail clients, since they can all at least see the inbox and delete messages. (except for gmail, sigh, where I can't do the "archive" operation from the built-in mail client)

For further optimization, I set up search folders that search through my archive folders if I want to keep tabs on particular mailing lists (and this works even for crossposted threads, some of which might end up in my inbox archive vs my list archive). I only ever read lists like this from one machine so that's fine.

It does require good search to exist. But with the gmail that's there, and with later versions of outlook and Win7, I can get that for work mail as well.

I was originally very concerned about preserving conversation threads in my inbox. If I delete messages after I read them, but then I get another message that's part of a thread for which I've already deleted, I was worried that I wouldn't be able to recover the context.

In practice, searching for messages with the matching subject line quickly recovers the thread. Usually that's good enough to build up any context, and it's faster than picking through a large inbox anyways (since Outlook's threading still doesn't quite work in all cases).

One thing that occurs to me that this is the first phone that I would consider using as an Internet device even after I've upgraded to a new phone in the future. The fact that it is a phone almost seems secondary.

Can't you just figure out that you're the only that's using it? And that I asked you to eject it through the same goddamn window?

Those who like the Pre like to point out that it can multitask: it can run more than one "card" at a time, and you get some interface to switch between them. This comes in handy, for example, if you want to an internet radio app while browsing the web with the browser app. On the iPhone you can't quite do this (though you can let the built in iTunes-based music app play in the background).

As I played with a friends Pre, I started using it like I use my desktop. Opening one application after another, not really thinking about how much memory was left. (When's the last time I've seen an out of memory error on a modern machine?) On the Pre, however, it's fairly easy to hit the memory limit. Seems to me like it takes about 4 browser windows and maybe a couple other apps.

Once you get into the out of memory state, things get annoying fast. Any action that would require a new card seems to freeze for a second, then the phone buzzes and tells you there's not enough memory, and that you need to close other cards.

Which card to close? Well, if you're a programmer, you may know that browsers are likely to eat the most memory out of the various kinds of apps you find a phone, so lets kill those first. Swipe to the card view.. and which of these cards are browsers? Actually, sometimes, it's quite hard to tell, especially since you're looking at thumbnails of web pages that can look like other apps.

In any case, the first time I hit this, I closed one card, then retried the operation. Still failed. Closed another, retried, still failed. Realized that there were still two other browser cards open, closed those, and finally I could open up my new contact.

The problems here are numerous.

• I don't know when I'm about to hit the memory limit, and when I do it takes a while for the phone to tell me I have.
• Recovering from the state is difficult, especially for users who may not know which apps take a lot of memory.
• There's no way to tell if I've closed enough cards. There's really no way for the OS to tell, since there's no guarantee that you're going to retry the same operation after you've closed some cards.

In light of my experience, Apple's decision to disallow multitasking on the iPhone doesn't seem so dumb. Sure they make some things inconvenient, but it also prevents users from getting into a situation that probably 90% of them would have a difficult time dealing with. It would be a huge usability hit, and the relative benefit would be rather small.

I guess until we have swap space on phones, multitasking is going to be something that will be difficult to implement usably, and I wouldn't be surprised if Apple continued to limit it significantly.

It's so good that I almost prefer using it over my big Vista desktop.

I'm on a stint of trying to use RHEL 5.3 at work, but now I really don't know how long I'm going to be able to last.

Sigh.

Well on the plus side, at least for the next year or so, it's going to be clear what the best OS to run is. So at least I can stop being OCD about it.

Update: seem to be hitting some bug where the screen will stop updating for a while (feels like several minutes). If video's playing, then the audio keeps coming out, but the screen is frozen.

Also, for others trying this on the X60.. don't forget to install the "System interface driver" from the Lenovo page.. or else things like the hotkey driver won't work. Also I had to do the registry hack described here to get the hotkey thing to install.

A little scared to install the power manager and power management driver. Won't those things conflict with the new Windows stuff?

A little digging shows that the fonts are still being worked on. The package version is up to 1.0.4.93. Changelog doesn't say much, except the occasional "fix bluriness for X" entries. In any case, the improvement is impressive. It's almost to the point that I can use it as an Arial replacement and it doesn't bother me.

If you're gonna use Linux on your desktop, then it's lame to try to use one of the "canned" environments. I mean, you're giving up all that application compatibility and workingness by going to Linux, so you might as well try to get the most flexibility and programmability you can get.

Anyways, I got the intrepid FVWM package, and as usual, I set it up to launch gnome-settings-daemon so that all the gnome/gtk apps that I use don't look like utter crap. Well turns out this breaks fvwm's shortcuts.

Took me a while to figure it out, but it was because gnome-settings-daemon turns on NumLock. And for some arcane reason, that breaks all of FVWM's shortcuts. No matter, a quick fix in the fvwmrc:

IgnoreModifiers L25

That is, don't treat NumLock and ScrollLock as they were modifiers. Even right there in the fvwm docs. Who else thinks they should make this the default? ;-)

Anyhow, I knew Intrepid still didn't quite have everything, so I decided to update to the late-alpha-status Jaunty.

Suprisingly, things are working quite well at the moment. Three big missing features are now available (with some work, of course):

• Trackpoint wheel emulation. You can turn it on using the xinput driver, and the configuration finally seems to persist reliably across suspend and resumes. I still have to turn it on with a script:

  
  

  
  
  #!/bin/sh
  
  
  DEVICEID=5
  
  xinput set-int-prop $DEVICEID "Evdev Wheel Emulation" 8 1
  
  xinput set-int-prop $DEVICEID "Evdev Wheel Emulation Button" 8 2
  
  xinput list-props $DEVICEID
  
  

  Where DEVICEID is something I get from the output of xinput list
  

• HDAPS, yes disk parking that's been in thinkpads since forever, FINALLY, works. A little extra work required however. In this case:
  • Get the tp_smapi out-of-tree driver from upstream. I tried building it with Ubuntu's module-assistant, but it doesn't seem to build the right hdaps driver there. With the upstream version, you can just type make load HDAPS=1 and it will load the driver.
  • Grab hdaps source from here. Yep it's just a .c file. You need to get 20081004 or later. Compile it using gcc, and name the output hdapsd. You can launch it like: sudo hdapsd -d sda -s 15

  And voila! disk parking! I can verify it works by runing du from /usr and watching the output stop and start as I shake the laptop. Cool. About fricking time.
  

• The machine doesn't get retardedly hot. The bottom side still gets a tad warm while plugged in, but the top side doesn't get unbearably warm like it used to. While on battery, temperature is just fine.