Mike Pirnat

So now that things have calmed down a little bit, I finally had time to install Leopard on the Mac Pro this weekend. I know I’m a bit late to the party, but here are a few quick thoughts so far…

The Good:

• Time Machine — syncs happily to the 500GB internal drive I installed last weekend (amusingly, with the words “honk if you love internal hard drives” printed on the inside of the box). Finally, something is doing at least some level of backup in our house!
• Safari — holy crap, fast fast fast! Feels like driving a zippy little sports car compared to the increasingly SUV-like Firefox (which has similar problems on tight corners).
• Searching for text — I love the visual emphasis on the search hits that “pops” the search result. It’s subtle, but really helps quickly identify where the result is, which is not always easy when looking at a wall of text.
• Searchable Help highlights menu options — freaking brilliant. No more wondering where your favorite menu options got moved to (*cough* Adobe *cough*).
• The Downloads folder. Yes, I already had my own that worked fine, but it’s nice that it’s earned an official special place, and it works well with the new Stacks feature for getting quickly to whatever I’ve just downloaded.
• Hot diggety, Python’s really nice out of the box!
• Quick Look is pretty nice; got a feeling I’ll be using it a lot soon.
• Grammar checker is now just as widely available as the spell-checker. Nice touch.
• Okay, the eye candy factor is nice too. I do like me some shiny things.

The Indifferent:

• The new 3D-ified Dock — not as horrible as all that. I’m slightly amused by how it picks up reflections from the windows above it. I could use nicer “here’s what’s running” indicators, but I’m just not seeing a justification for all the controversy.
• The new menu bar — square corners and semi-transparent… It’ll take a little getting used to, but it’s not going to upset me.
• Stacks — I kind of like these, but I’m not 100% in love with them yet.
• The new folder icons. Not doing it for me.
• I wonder how long I’ll want to live in the “deep space” look.

The Really Annoying:

• I have to upgrade Photoshop and friends. Granted, I was still running Photoshop 7, so I’m a bit behind the times on that, but it still sucks that what was working like a champ for me under Tiger completely craps out in Leopard. Boo, hiss.
• XJournal, my LiveJournal client of choice on the Mac, crashes upon log-in to LJ. No Leopard-friendly upgrade is available yet. Again, boo, hiss.
• Startup disk? What startup disk? Immediately after my first boot into Leopard, there was a software update that wanted to be dealt with promptly. So I took care of that, rebooted, and was greeted with the blinking file folder of doom, signifying that no startup disk could be found. Not the most rewarding experience after all of the anticipation and the lengthy upgrade.

And now back to actually doing stuff with the computer instead of poking it to see what it does…

apple, computers, geekery, macintosh

I was pleasantly surprised tonight to discover that the Harmony folks have a pretty decent pre-set profile for Apple TV, so instead of an evening full of tedious Googling and button-learning, I had everything working in a few brief minutes, and I’m back to one-remote bliss–it even manages to put the Apple TV to sleep correctly! The only notable omission is that while the fast forward and rewind buttons get hooked up automatically, the next and previous track buttons don’t. Luckily, fixing that is pretty simple.

Life, at least on the technological front, is good. (The rest is pretty good too, but not tremendously noteworthy.)

apple, appletv, geekery

I’m really excited by the amount of progress I’ve made over the last couple of weekends, hacking away at what for now is known as Shindig, a group management blog/calendar app written against TurboGears. Its primary purpose is to be something easier and faster for me to maintain than ClePy’s current Plone site. I’m sure much of what it solves has already been done, but I want something exactly tuned to giving me the most streamlined workflow possible, and, let’s face it, it’s just plain fun to write code.

So ordinarily, I’d be psyched about how much I’d be able to get done this weekend… Except that the stupid Harry Potter book is showing up in the mail tomorrow, and that basically means that it will consume every waking, lighted hour until it’s done. I love the books, I really do, but it’s really putting a crimp on my Python geek-out sessions. But I have to be done reading by Monday, that’s for sure, or else I will have to gouge my eyes out to avoid spoilers. My predictions: Snape dies (he’s obviously been set up for a hard-core double-agent redemption arc, so he’ll probably save the day somehow), Harry lives (and will be the best Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher ever), and Ron and Hermione will finally succumb to the powerful call of teenage hormones and romantic comedy conventions and hook up in a major way.

Oh, yes, and I’m going to see Howard Shore conducting the Cleveland Orchestra in performance of his Lord of the Rings Symphony tomorrow night, so that knocks out a couple more hours of potential coding time. Which I guess I can live with; enjoying some of my favorite music, conducted by its composer, performed by one of the world’s foremost orchestras, under the night sky, with a picnic and a nice glass of wine… Should be a real treat.

…

Tonight marks 24 hours since the arrival of the Apple TV. So far, I’m very, very impressed. I have modest needs, primarily to replace an aging SlimP3 that’s prone to chronic buffer under-runs ever since I replaced my dying firewall, and it solves all of my most common use cases with total aplomb. I’ve been delightfully impressed by its streaming performance, which, even with an 802.11b/g setup, is nothing short of freaking amazing. I’m also very satisfied with the image quality out of the component video cables (chosen since our altar to the television gods predates HDMI by a generation or so). My advice so far, to any prospective owners, boils down to two points:

1. Don’t do your initial sync over wireless if you don’t have 802.11n hardware. Wired ethernet is your friend by orders of magnitude.
2. Its case serves as its heat sink, which is to say it gets hot like you wouldn’t believe. Don’t set it on top of your DVD player or other hardware (unless you want to cook your gear), and make sure that it gets plenty of airflow. Honestly, I used oven mitts to bring it upstairs to wire it into my switch to finish the initial sync. Yikes!

Beware of the YouTube integration; Liz and I must have spent an hour tonight watching videos of cats doing stupidly cute things. It is a powerful and addictive time-sink.

…

Finally, I’m happy to report that the first of two freebie poster-size prints from Shutterfly arrived today and it looks great. I picked up a 50mm prime lens for my Canon (Digital Rebel XT) recently, and the folks at Amazon threw in a coupon for one free 11×14 and 16×20 print. The 16×20 (which I expect sometime Saturday or Monday) will probably end up framed and in our dining room, next to some other wine-related art, and the 11×14 (which showed up today) will probably find a home in our living room. I’m really quite tickled–I’ve never printed any of my work larger than 5×7 before–but I fear that I could start going poor making prints of my better photos. Oh well; Liz said I should find a hobby….

apple, appletv, clepy, concerts, culture, harry-potter, lord-of-the-rings, music, photos, python, shindig

Dang, it’s suddenly turning out to be a great week! In brief:

• After a couple miserable days of near-100-degree temperatures, the weather has cooled off and is now downright awesome.
• Got my monitor back from Apple (no thanks to DHL, who apparently don’t even believe in leaving slips at the door when they ignore the “no one will be home between X and Y, please deliver when it will actually make sense to do so” instructions). It’s all fixed and happy, and now the cats have a new box to play with. It really is amazing how much better the ACD is than the old 19″ monitor I’d been using in its stead…
• I totally aced the infant CPR course we did last night. Plus, since everyone else was either too timid or too cool to do the “say stuff out loud along with the script” part of the training, my long-dormant inner theater geek had an excellent opportunity to ham it up loudly, to the amusement of all. Thought for today: “The scene is safe!“
• This is the week that I finally have cleared enough off of my plate at work to dig into fixing the crapton of problems on our new site that are Safari-specific. It was an uphill battle for a few days, but this afternoon I finally had the “eureka!” moment of complete enlightenment and discovered the one bug in the JavaScript framework we’re using that seems to be the lynchpin holding everything up. With what’s literally a one-line change, close to twenty really horribly broken things on our site suddenly and miraculously work. Huzzah! I’ll probably have something more on this once I get the legal OK from work to the disclose details of that portion of my brain…
• We had a major project launch and data conversion that started last night at midnight… and for the first time in forever, I didn’t have to do anything to support it. No being online from home, no camping out in the office, no having to monkey with it in the morning, nothing. After seven years of driving in at two or three in the morning, I can’t describe how great that feels to just not have to worry about it.
• Liz kicked ass on her most recent papers! You go, girl!
• The window’s open, the sunset was lovely, the breeze is delightful, good music on the ol’ MP3 player, and a cold beer. Ahhh, bliss.

I’m not entirely sure whether recent events are karma’s equivalent of the cash-back bonus, or if I’ve just taken out a karma-equity loan that’ll eventually catch up to me, but for now I’m just going to enjoy feeling happy.

apple, computers, life, liz, macintosh, weather, work

Naturally, right at the height of the iPhone hooplah, the USB ports on the back of my 23″ Apple Cinema Display would decide to die a sad and lonely death.

I woke up this morning to find that neither my keyboard nor mouse (the USB devices attached to the back of the ACD) would wake Serenity from its slumber. I gently caressed the power button on the front to trigger it to wake, and found that mouse and keyboard had left the building; it was totally unresponsive. I tried both ports on the back of the ACD and had the same result. So, like a good little geek trained in the scientific method, I started isolating variables, testing each of the USB ports on the Mac Pro itself (all good), testing other USB gizmos in the display (no joy), testing the display against each USB port on the Mac Pro (also no joy), testing a different keyboard and mouse against the display (nothing) and each of the ports on the box itself (all fine), and finally testing the display plugged into an entirely different Mac (still no luck).

My super-awesome wife has volunteered to call Apple tomorrow since I missed the cut-off time for the Apple Care hotline. I strongly suspect that Saturday or Sunday will involve another trip out to the Genius Bar, which I’m sure will be a delightful place to visit among the throngs of prospective iPhone buyers… Snarf. Hopefully they can just swap it out with a new display since it’s still under warranty (just barely six months old!); I’d really hate to be without a display for days or weeks.

Meanwhile, I’ve discovered that there is great wisdom in never throwing out extra cables. (Hooray for USB extenders!)

apple, computers, macintosh