Cafe Bucky

This is a quick followup to the post Commands, Scripting, and Wading Through 10,000 Files. I had mentioned that I like to keep a copy of a checksum file, but I didn’t show a script that really takes advantage of pairs of them. “comparesnaps.pl” allows you to see changes across the same set of files over time …

Without further ado, here is a link to comparesnaps.pl

This grew out of a thread from the FlashCodersNY.org group

Ever have to wade through tens of thousands of files, trying to decide which ones are duplicates? One scenario would involve comparing backups of the same thing (think “large dev project” or “email archives” or “500 photos named DC_something.jpg) made at different times. Inspired by an email from Jean-Charles Carelli, I’ve written up a perl-based approach. (this extends the “command line” thread on the list recently)

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Tiger’s a hit in the Price Smith household, and we’ve only looked at a couple of its claws.

Oh, wait. That’s overstating it. What I mean to say is that my daughter and I are happy checking it out, but we’re not ready to make it the default OS on our PowerBooks. Susan will be happy to watch us be guinea pigs.

A friend of mine had this to say about my cautiousness: “Coward! Don’t you trust Steve?”

Heh heh … not with my only machine on hand. I’d rather bounce between Panther and Tiger until the dust settles. I’m happy to say it’s not too dusty ….

Spotlight

So anyways! Spotlight rocks. The Apple rep at the SoHo event said it would index a drive in 15 minutes. I silently rolled my eyes, and donned a wetsuit to withstand Perfect Stormwaves of marketing hype. Of course it takes a lot longer than that, but it’s all good once things are indexed. Speaking of indexing, you’ll find some useful hints over at “Force Spotlight to reindex a drive”. Sophia asked a pretty good question at the event: “can you search for files opened within the last 6 or 12 hours?”. The answer we heard was “no”. I don’t quite believe it though, as I imagine a plugin of some sort will be able to get at timestamps and let you perform more fine-grained searches. Someone that looks through dozens of files per day (like my wife) is going to want the “within the last two hours” option.

An iTunes tip …

I choose to do a fresh install on an external drive, and slowly build up my environment. I don’t know what the migration tools do about your iTunes account. Here’s the tip: before you kill off Panther, deauthorize your iTunes account! When you get going with iTunes on Tiger, you can then reauthorize your account. I suspect that if you don’t do this, the Panther “slot” never gets freed up, and you effectively have one less “computer” on which you can play your purchased music. I could just say “tie up loose ends before doing something new”.

Dashboard

I love some of the widgets that come with Tiger, and am looking forward to seeing what I can do with them (since they’re basically JavaScript, HTML, and CSS). There’s a good overview at “Developing Dashboard Widgets”. One of favorite non-Apple widgets so far is dashLicious, which I’ll use to quickly save bookmarks on my del.icio.us space.

Sophia likes the Dictionary/Thesaurus, and couldn’t resist the the Hula Girl widget. I like the Phone Book, but I’m going to modify it to use Google maps instead of Mapquest.

Speed

My initial impression of Tiger is “right on!”, and some of that has to do with speed. I know Safari feels a lot faster. As far as the general feel of the finder and the system in general, I don’t know how much to attribute to “new setup”, and how much to “external firewire drive which is faster than internal PowerBook drive”. Time will tell. Dashboard and Spotlight will do a lot to speed up the “find something, or look something” aspect of using a Mac, so that’s a big win.

Way to go, Apple.

The first thing to get out of the way is the comparison between Panther and Tiger. The Tiger crowd is much sharper:


and the Panther crowd was blurry (from October 2003):


From this alone, we can conclude that Tiger is a better OS.

As is true with any Friday or Saturday evening, Apple SoHo was crowded:


It’s a good thing that there are 2-3 more Apple stores in the works for Manhattan (one next to FAO Schwartz). Apple SoHo is simply too small to handle the island by itself.

I did promise to get a blurry shot:

After half an hour or so of what was a surprisingly boring demo of Spotlight, Sophia and I high-tailed it over towards Astor Place and rang up Susan (armed with a Holga) to come join us for din-din. Susan is at home, waiting for the post Apple store call:

You should know that if you ever go to Astor Place, you must state clearly which Starbucks you’ll meet at, since there are a couple that are catty-corner. The one next to the Downtown exit is, of course, much better. They use better beans, have friendly people, foam the milk better, and count out change a little faster. The one across the street is merely proud to be in its shadow. The other thing to know about Astor Place is that there are hundreds of people milling around waiting for their friends to show up. It’s The Portal into the Lower East Side. The tattoos and piercings get better by the block as you walk eastward …

Here you can see Sophia dutifully studying the Tiger “manual”. I’m, er, people watching:

So we all meet up, walk all over, and end up finding a cool Italian place on 2nd Avenue. Then things started really getting blurry…
	.. seriously .. .

Nah nah nah, just kidding! This wasn’t some booze-fest at CBGB’s. We ambled around in that in-between zone where we aren’t tourists, but we’re not from that neighborhood either. Clutching the precious copy of Tiger, we bounded down to the train:


Time to transfer:


Bleary-eyed, Tiger would have to wait! Moral is: go right home after purchasing, do not head out for a night on the town :-)

Yeah, something to say about Tiger soon. Here’s a little nod to HD-like aspect ratios… My daughter and I have been busy checking out Apple’s new Cat.

Deja vu all over again.

It was October 24th, 2003, that I stood in line to buy Panther. I’ll certainly be at Apple SoHo tomorrow night, if only to keep some sense of Geek Cred. I mean, it would have been all too easy to just order the damn Tiger from Amazon, right? I enjoy a sense of occasion. I’ll even wear my Panther dog tags. To those that understand, no explanation is necessary, and to those that don’t, no explanation will suffice :-)

As I did last time, I’ll be cautious and only install Tiger on an external FW drive. I only have the one Mac here in NY, but have about 5 FW drives – easy call! I can suffer booting Panther outside the house for a little while. The word on the web points to some broken apps and some annoyances. Word to the wise: don’t switch over completely until the first update (or second, or third …), and for gawd’s sake, back up your schtuff!

I’ll try to get some blurry pictures.

What was it, a few days ago I was talking about all of the different Linux distros, and that there wasn’t enough of a common face?

Well, allow me to restate, update, and elaborate … There really ARE way too many Linux distros. I think many of them are more from the idea of “hey, I figured out how to make a distro!”, than the idea of “hey, let’s advance the state of the art in some way…” Consider what the situation looks like from the POV of someone still mentally stuck in Windows la la land – they peek at the Linux world, get scared at what looks like chaos, and go running back to the illusion of Windows comfort and safety. Keyword: Illusion.

So with that in mind, it’s been an interesting week, because Ubuntu Linux got a major update. It so happens that I’ll be doing a round of Linux installs soon, so I’m in the market to find something, anything, that saves me from the tedious process of dealing with Debian. (plus I know I’ll be dealing with new hardware…)

Ubuntu is based on Debian, but with some important differences:

• the install should “Just Work” – hardware detection is very good
• updates new versions available every six months
• more recent kernel

I also like the fact that it seems to have a very well developed web site, an active community, and what looks to be a commitment of money (free CDs shipped to you, if you’d like) from Canonical (which gets support from Mark Shuttleworth). It looks like it will be there for a while, and that a lot of thought and effort is going into it.

Winding back to “here and now”, I’m about to head back to NYC for a couple of months, and know that I’ll want a Linux box or two there. I figured I’d take a little time to install Ubuntu on an old iMac DV I have lying around [1]. I recommend using BitTorrent to download a disk image to burn.

Some things noticed installing to a Mac iMac DV (400 mhz):

• text installer – but so what, it detected everything
• there was a hiccup of the “multiseat” module not installing. Ignored this. (it turns out this has to do with multiple users simultaneously hitting the window system (x.org))
• didn’t have to answer any silly questions about my framebuffer, or my mouse. Gnome comes up, and it “Just Works” as advertised
• scrollwheel mouse works out of the box – w00t!
• Mpeg streaming (SomaFM) does not work out of the box, but a quick Google search gives me hope

All in all, Ubuntu seems to live up to the hype. It’ll be the distro I use on PC or PPC hardware when I get back to NYC (that’s another post).

[1] Sorry Sophia, I have co-opted your west coast box! But your old PowerBook may be getting a new friend soon :-)

Spotted on Gizmodo: Qualuudinous iPod World Video