Cafe Bucky

I didn’t get to the Fifth Avenue Apple Store opening. Something to do with being in California. I’ll get there though!

In the meantime, there are tons of photos on Flickr, Gothamist had a good writeup, there were two marriage proposals, most of the SNL cast showed up, and there’s more detail over at ifostore.

Oh, and a corporate-sanctioned gallery

Check out the time-lapse video. I imagine that link will be temporary, but, of course, you know it’s going to end up on YouTube and everywhere else.

I got to Macworld a couple of times this week, and saw the keynote over a stream sometime late Tuesday. The new Intel boxes are great, though it remains to be seen how well the first iteration holds up once they start shipping.

Heat

The MacBook Pro that I saw was a preproduction unit. It runs HOT. I’d say hotter than my 17″ G4. Hopefully they’ll get that addressed in the shipping units.

Evolution

This first Intel iteration doesn’t really look different than the PowerBook. There’s an iSight camera built in, an IR port, and the ExpressCard slot is narrower than the one it replaces. In between that and the “MacBook Pro” lettering replacing “PowerBook G4″, it’s pretty much the same design with some minor tweaks. I get the feeling Apple rushed this one out, in order to deal with a lot of pent up demand. The next revision ought to reveal their true intentions. Hopefully the 12″ and 17″ versions will be out before too long (though I’ve read that Intel doesn’t have enough Core Duo chips to go around, and is making HP and Dell wait in line)

FW800

At first, I was dismayed that the MacBook Pro left off support for Firewire 800. Perhaps that’s because my wife and I have ~8 LaCie FW800 drives between us.

I quickly spoke to a person from firmtek.com at the Apple booth. He was holding an ExpressCard SATA adapter. That’ll be good news for people that want to do external SATA. I told him that he should consider a FW800 adapter. Someone’s got to do it, right?

Dual Layer SuperDrive?

The MacBook Pro doesn’t offer a Dual Layer DVD burner. Apparently they moved from a 12mm thick drive in the PowerBook, to a new one that’s 9mm. It seems like a strange compromise, but the new machine is slightly thinner. I wonder if they’ll skip to an HD or BluRay burner in a laptop in a year or so. On the other hand, I wouldn’t expect anyone to burn something over 10 gb and still have much battery left.

[make that "a few years". CNet has an article about how clunky the large HD DVD players looked at CES.]

iMac Monitor Spanning

Hey, unlike the G5 iMac, the Intel iMac supports monitor spanning, Digital resolutions up to 1920 x 1200. Analog resolutions up to 2045 x 1536.

iMac Memory

The G5 iMac supported up to 2.5gb of RAM. The Intel supports up to 2gb. Interesting…

The EFI Boot Thing

A question floating around is: will the Intel Macs support dual or triple booting? (OS X, Linux, and Windows) Windows XP reportedly wants a BIOS to boot from. Engadget has a blurb about it. My hunch is that the Linux community will solve it first - they’ll quickly come up with a way to get Intel distros running on the MacBook Pro and the new iMac. Why? Well, for no other reason than to beat the Windows people to it :-)

First off, Happy New Year!

I’ll be at Macworld SF next week, at least on Tuesday and another day. I don’t have a conference pass, so I’ll check out the exhibits and get to events to meet people. A couple of events are the TWiT broadcast, and Deb Shadovitz’s Party For The People. Those are on Tuesday. The Netter’s Dinner on Thursday looks like fun.

I’d enjoy meeting up with folks next week at MWSF, particularly if they’re into PHP/web-dev stuff, or photo databases, or splitting things up with Linux (what do you like to run on which platform, etc.) I’d also like to talk to folks that have had success with Ruby on Rails - I’ve read why’s (poignant) guide to ruby [1] and some other Ruby docs, and totally get it. Looks like an excellent thing to learn. If you know of a web-dev gig, check out my resume. If it seems like there could be a good fit, let’s meet up this week, or at MWSF.

[1] which is a bizarre bit of writing, sort of like Hunter Thompson writing a book about cooking. But there is good Ruby info in there.

Back in June I wrote No More Than A Mac Mini For Now

How completely silly of me. I wish to use these pixels to express my nearly unbridled lust for the new dual-processor, dual core core G5. The machine is ffffast! Yes, I know there will be an Intel box (eventually), but there’s also the idea of Getting More Done Now. Yes, it’s irrational, and yes, it’s just a shiny aluminum box. It’s one of those “if you don’t know, you’ll never get it, and if you do, no explanation is necessary” things.

I bet Susan will get one first. We both use our 17″ PowerBooks as our main machines, and with just 1gb of RAM, we’re in memory to disk swapping hell. We could buy more ram, but what’s the fun in that? She’s going to come back from PhotoPlus Expo all jazzed (rightfully so) about Aperture, and will need a hefty Mac to make good use if it.

And with Winter coming, it doubles as a heater!

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I am holding off on any major Mac purchases until the Intel versions come out. We just got a Mac mini for my daughter though … and that lead to slight mods, which are always fun.

When I went to order, my idea was: don’t pay California sales tax, get 1gb RAM, and get the faster processor with airport + bluetooth. If you start shopping around, you’ll notice that retailers generally have airport + bluetooth, but with 512mb RAM, or they have everything with a SuperDrive, and it’s more expensive, and so on. Ordering direct from Apple was out - lots of sales tax!

So I ordered a Mac mini with 256mb RAM, and an airport + bluetooth kit which would usually be sold to some species of Authorized Hardware Tech. I went to Crucial.com for a 1gb RAM chip. No sales tax. Parts to put together.

I won’t post photos of the surgery here. It’s pretty easy to track down various bits of Mac mini disassembly. The basic idea is to look at the pretty pictures that others have posted, have tools handy (2 putty knives and a very small philips), a clean surface (terry bath towel), and lots of patience.

Hints on Mac mini modding:

• Try not to. Oh? You want to save some money and you like 3 dimensional puzzles? Ok, that’s different. I will warn that it’s a bit non-trivial, and it should NOT be the first computer you’ve ever opened up.
• Disclaimer: You can do some serious damage to your mini, and / or get shocked (seriously). This is a two beer job, but don’t drink both beforehand!
• Start first beer.
• The bit about opening the case with a putty knife … I say: use two, and sharpen them first (scrape on concrete to get a nice edge, and then definitely clean off / dry the blade) Wedge them in slightly on either side before pulling back, otherwise you’ll have one side popped open, and no seam to work with on the other …
• For the airport + bluetooth card, you will need to remove the drives and fan unit. That uses three screws. Be careful to unfasten the tape to the power wire, so that you can pull the assembly off cleanly. Study the pictures (MacWorld) and (JohnWaller.org) before plunging in.
• Start second beer.
• Once you have the drive unit off, might as well swap the RAM chip. Don’t wait till later, when an antenna will be blocking the path.
• The kit comes with two tiny screws. You’ll use them to fasten the airport + bluetooth daughtercard (be sure that card is seated properly - do not spill beer onto motherboard). Take your time.
• Figure out how you will route the two antenna cables. Look at the pictures to see how they end up. Be gentle with rotating the cables where they connect to the daughtercard.
• When repositioning the drive assembly and tightening its screws, take care not to pinch off the antennas or other cables.
• When putting the case back on the mini, be careful with alignment, and don’t force the metal tabs on top of the ports. It all fits, but it’s not a brute force deal.
• Finish beer, boot, check for 1gb ram, airport, and bluetooth!

This is a nerdy take on part of my “upgrading the PowerBook OS” process. I really can write exciting things about cliff diving, and skateboard jumping the Great Wall of China, and anecdotes about High Performance Driving Schools. First things first …

One project in my “Reset” month has been to redo my PowerBook from scratch to Tiger (10.4.2). It’s a small detour from the study of things LAMPish and AJAXian, but I consider it all part of the idea of resetting (and I have a little time to do it the way I want). An upgrade done right feels a little like getting a new machine. The “booting Tiger off the external drive” deal doesn’t show proper commitment :-)

Part of the process (that I let run overnight) is making good backups of my Panther system. I highly recommend Mike Bombich’s Carbon Copy Cloner. I made one backup as a disk image (I have a cool WiebeTech ComboDock that lets me access IDE drives through Firewire), and another as a bootable drive on an external LaCie. So far, so happy.

Since I have an old iMac DV hanging around, I boot my old Panther system off the LaCie. It’s just like my PowerBook, but slower and smaller (1024×768). This takes the pressure off of having to copy everything back to my “new” PowerBook at once.

So all of that brings me to the point where I have a fresh PowerBook, an iMac that runs my “old setup”, and a terabyte of external FireWire drives that have 100’s of thousands of files.

The current step is figuring out what gets to live on the PowerBook, as in: “what gets to live on the internal drive?”. Certainly a full-on dev environment, and a representative swath of my photography, some (but not all) email, and so on. I call this the “filtering” step. What’s on the drive when I am out of the house and not necessarily on a speedy network? (another project is getting the Firewire drives on a box that I can get to from the outside world, oy!)

The conjoined twin of filtering is “organization”. I will certainly use Spotlight, and will tag some key files, but the age-old problem of “where to put things” remains. Is an artlicle about Flash Remoting to PHP something that goes in Tech/Dev/Lang/PHP? or Flash? How many links/aliases do I feel like making this time around?

The thing that occurs to me about organizing files and folders/directories, now that I’ve been doing it for about 25 years, is that it is all consistent with your state of mind At The Time Of Organization. The best you can hope for is to get everything slotted away in one flurry, before you change your mind as to “what goes where”. When we start getting inconsistent is when we start filing things away at different times, in a different mood, particularly with things that are outside the organizational scheme we already have (i.e. we suddenly need to make a new branch in our directory tree, and there are 4 equally great places to put it).

So today’s project is getting the PowerBook “caught up”, so that Tiger becomes my main boot. With enough focus coffee, I think I can get through it. I think we’re getting to the point where strict folder hierarchies are no longer so important (on a personal document scale), and where tagging becomes ever more important. Good thing, that!

I’ve had a couple of days to ponder the Apple/Intel marriage. I’ve read numerous articles about it. It’s going to work out to be a really good thing. What seems to have been the problem is that IBM just didn’t have their heart into making great chips for Apple in a timely manner. Imagine how embarassing it would be for Steve Jobs to do next January’s keynote and say “we still don’t have a G5 PowerBook, but we have a speed bumped G4 that will run for two hours on a charge”.

So the mid-term future is bright, but how will Apple spin the next 12 months? What G5 product are they going to introduce that won’t be seen as a sitting duck? Could they possibly introduce a machine with a swappable CPU/Logic Board? (G5 now, Intel later?) Nah, somehow a convertible strategy feels like a real reach, even when considering the radical moves we’ve seen from Apple.

My short-term strategy is this: minimize the Apple hardware commitment. My daughter is about to turn 12, and her G3 PowerBook is showing its age (hinge just broke, CD drive doesn’t work, too slow to run a couple of apps we have in mind). I had considered getting her a G5 iMac, but now a better strategy seems to be: get a Mac mini + Airport, bump up the RAM, and get an LCD monitor (I love my Sony SDM-HS75P, so perhaps another one of those). We can think about an Intel Mac next year, and transition the Mac mini to be the entertainment / house server, or throw Ubuntu Linux on it.

There’s a lot more to say on this, and it would be much faster to just podcast it :-) My sense is that the Mac community is going through a highly emotionally charged time (what!? Intel?!), and that a sense of acceptance will quickly emerge - something along the lines of “IBM is cool for certain things, but they really dropped the ball on Apple, and it’s a good thing that Apple had a contingency plan in place”.

A diagram of core web development interests, with a few comments …

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