Another Word for Nerd

I’m testing out Qumana, a new weblog client for OSX and Windows.  It’s a Universal Binary, so I can use it natively on the Intel-based Mac at home.

So far, my main comment is "takes way too long to start up", compared to MarsEdit (on the 1.25Ghz G4) or even Ecto under Rosetta emulation on the Core Duo iMac at home.

It has a good user interface so far, so we’ll see how things go.

I got Rhapsody DR2 and OpenStep 4.2 running in the Parallels VM on my Intel-based Macintosh.

(OpenStep was the precursor to Rhapsody, which was the precursor to Mac OS X…)

is this!

After the past 24 hours, I’ve come to the conclusion that there needs to be a universal file system format that has the same support on all operating systems.

My main “server” system here at the house is a Dell PowerEdge SC420 with a 2.5Ghz Celeron-D CPU, 1G RAM, 160G SATA HD, and GigE. Since I got the machine (for $250 during one of Dell’s CRAAAZY DEALS last year), I’ve been running Fedora Core 4 on it with no problems. On top of FC4, I use rsnapshot to do nightly backups of my colocated server and some client machines.

I decided a few days ago that it was time to ditch FC4 and put Solaris 10 on the machine now that all the hardware is fully supported. First, however, I needed to get my rsnapshot repository off the machine. That was accomplished with a 250G SATA hard drive and a SATA to USB2 adapter with power supply. Now I had my critical data on an ext2-formatted hard drive.

I proceeded to reinstall the Dell with the latest Solaris Express release. I then installed the ext2fs drivers for Solaris 10, and attempted to rsync the data back off the hard drive. Five minutes in, the system wedges hard and requires a reboot.

Okay, so that’s not going to work. I carry the HD and adapter back into the other room, plug it into the Mac, and install ext2fsx. When I try to mount the drive, it complains about a bad superblock. So, a couple hours of forced-fsck_ext2 later, I can mount the drive.

When I try to rsync from the Mac over the network to the Dell, the Mac gripes about filenames on the ext2 partition. Crap. That’s not going to work either, and I don’t have another Linux box to mount the HD on.

It was then that I realized I didn’t *need* another permanent Linux installation. I downloaded Knoppix, booted it on my AMD64 Windows gaming box, then plugged the USB/SATA HD in. It was detected and mounted right up, and has been happily rsync-ing everything back to the Dell/Solaris system for the past couple of hours.

I know that in my situation, having a couple of big disks sitting on an NFS server would have been the easiest way to do things. Others might have suggested FAT32, however my rsnapshot backup repository makes heavy use of UNIX hard links, and would not be “portable” to FAT32.

This all demonstrates the need for a truly portable filesystem that can be easily transported between operating systems without having to use ugly hacks. I’m hoping that ZFS might eventually be the solution, if Sun ports it to Linux as rumored and even maybe OSX.

I’m wondering if it would be usable on single disks, since everything I’ve seen seems to emphasize its mirroring/redundancy and handling of multi-disk pools over its non-dependency on byte endianness and portability between CPU architectures.

SBCL build on an Apple Intel Core Duo iMac (Dual-core 2Ghz, 1G RAM):

//build started: Mon Mar 6 08:48:56 CST 2006
//build finished: Mon Mar 6 08:58:54 CST 2006
real 9m58.717s
user 8m50.595s
sys 0m31.261s

Thanks to Cyrus Harmon’s patch for 20060503 SBCL from CVS. I used CLISP (v2.37) to bootstrap SBCL from source, then recompiled it with itself just to make sure things were going to work.

gojira:~ mrbill$ uname -a
Darwin gojira.local 8.5.1 Darwin Kernel Version 8.5.1: Mon Jan 30 21:07:08 PST 2006; root:xnu-792.8.36.obj~1/RELEASE_I386 i386 i386
gojira:~ mrbill$ sbcl
This is SBCL 0.9.10.15, an implementation of ANSI Common Lisp.
More information about SBCL is available at .

SBCL is free software, provided as is, with absolutely no warranty.
It is mostly in the public domain; some portions are provided under
BSD-style licenses. See the CREDITS and COPYING files in the
distribution for more information.
*

Cyrus Harmon finally has SBCL working under OS X on an Intel-based Mac. I can get back in the swing of things now. Thanks, Cyrus!

Apple released the Intel Core-based Mac mini systems today. Overall, I’m underwhelmed, and glad I bought the 20″ Core Duo iMac instead of waiting for the Intel mini as I’d originally planned.

Apple no longer offers a sub-$500 computer. You’re forced to pay $100 more for a system with built-in wireless (802.11b/g and Bluetooth) even if you don’t need it, and Intel GMA950 integrated graphics. While the new integrated graphics chipset is a performance improvement over the older Radeon 9200, it “steals” system memory (according to Apple, a minimum of 80M) to use as graphics memory. As a result, instead of a 512M system out-of-the-box you’ve got a 432M system. Other changes include two DDR2 SODIMM slots instead of a single DDR DIMM slot, four USB2 ports (up from two), gigabit Ethernet, and analog/optical audio in (finally) and out. Prices start at $599, but I’ll pass. If they’d released a version without the built-in wireless for the original $499, I would have thought about picking one up.

(I’m sure the reason that wireless is not an option is that its built into the Intel system chipset and isn’t a “piggyback” board as it was on previous models.)

I find it highly ironic to look at Apple’s original web page about the G4-based Mac mini graphics:

“Go ahead, just try to play Halo on a budget PC. Most say they’re good for 2D games only. That’s because an “integrated Intel graphics” chip steals power from the CPU and siphons off memory from system-level RAM. You’d have to buy an extra card to get the graphics performance of Mac mini, and some cheaper PCs don’t even have an open slot to let you add one.”

If you are looking for a great gift idea, consider a fruit basket.  It’s a really nice gesture for a co-worker you don’t know much about or a new neighbor.  Gift baskets are the all purpose gift.  We even carry kosher gift baskets too!

Here’s mine.

I finally broke down and bought a 30G iPod Video (black, of course) a couple of days ago.

No, not that del.icio.us, I’m talking about Delicious Library from Delicious Monster.

Using the built-in iSight camera on my new Mac, I’ve started cataloging all of the books I own - and boy, do I own a lot.

I’m about half done, and here’s the library so far.

The iMac G5 (17″, 1.8Ghz, SuperDrive/wireless/etc) that I bought in October of 2004 is being wiped and reinstalled tonight, in preparation for its travels to its new home with a friend of mine.

This machine served me well, running 24/7/365 (except for January 2005, when I was living in a hotel and using the iBook G4 as my primary machine) for a year and a half. I consider it a rock-solid machine, save for the midplane replacement in March 2005 (caused by bad capacitors) and a power supply replacement in November.

I’m pretty happy with my 20″ iMac Core Duo so far. Apple has done a great job with the PPC emulation (”Rosetta”) in the new machines, and I can only hear the fans on the new system when everything else in the room is turned off. My Pentium M-based work laptop is louder than the iMac, even.