Archive for October, 2008
HAPPY HALLOWEEN!
Posted by jdodson in Uncategorized, humor, offhandstrangity on October 31, 2008
OR you can download a large file to watch without flash(Requires Quicktime OR VLC):
* jbdodons ghost stories vol. 1 – 35M H264 m4v
Quite A Bit Like Something It Is Not
Posted by jdodson in Uncategorized on October 29, 2008
Using a mac is like riding a sweet bike with a very small seat. Its still a cool bike, but not totally awesome because it has a really small seat. I guess I could have made that analogy better.
- iTunes is not quite as good as Rhythmbox but Genius playlists are very cool
- The BSD toolchain is not quite as good as the GNU toolchain. Unsure if this is just 5+ years of Linux talking.
- Lack of “native supported” package manager is the lamest shit ever. Darwin ports is OK but not the supported apple path and like Fink, has issues with Apples xcode.
- Apples Spaces is not even close to as good as Gnomes virtual desktops. Its like a dumbed down ugly cousin. PS If you know the magic to move applications from one space to the other, let me know.
- Time Machine is pretty cool. Its like rsnapshot but easier and with auto nice built-in.
- Adium is a good chat program but this is not Apple related.
- Having a webcam built it is nice, however this is hardly Apple only.
- Battery on the laptop lasts a good length, but then again, I have more life on my Lenovo.
- Mac handles external monitor seamlessly. This is something that is close in Linux, no idea what its like in Vista.
Merry Halloween
Posted by jdodson in Uncategorized on October 29, 2008
Halloween is one of my fav. times of year. I really love Halloween lore and stylized Halloween stuff. I like how creative people are around this holiday. I like candy. I like autumn.
So I guess I tip my hat to the devil for being evil or what have you. Or maybe it has something to do with the changing seasons? Either case, its a good time.
Easystreet
Went to a talk on cloud computing @ Easystreet. It was a pretty good talk. Easystreet is like the fine wine of datacenters, the cost is high as is the quality.
“Cloud Computing” AKA virtualization is another buzzword I no longer like. Its right up there with web 2.0. I have to admit, if I had a buzzword scorecard, todays talk would score high. Especially when the speaker quotes lines from people like “paradigm shift.”
Paradigm shift…. 
It was a good talk and I now know what cloud computing is. GO PARADIGM SHIFTING TECHNOLOGIES THAT LEVERAGE SYNERGIES IN SWEET VERTICLE MARKETS!
It was a fun meeting.
Macbook Pro flies…. with 4 gigs of RAM!
Hi.
Second work week at the new job and its going well. Plenty to keep me busy with. Plenty to think about. Plenty of choices to sift through. Boredom won’t be on my radar for quite some time, if at all really. In the end id rather be nose to the razor busy with tasks than bored.
Recently I noted to the new company that this macbook pro was SLOW on 1G of memory. First time a full gig of memory wasn’t enough for a machine ive used. I think it must be the mac bloat or something. Ive used Ubuntu for years and gotten by fine with a gig or less. Regardless, having only one gig would cause the mac to swap much to disk and thereby make things VERY slow.
Ive found that mac may be a fine desktop OS but not in terms of desktop responsiveness in a low resource state(1 gig of ram it seems). The Linux kernel must kick the Mac OS kernels ass or something, perhaps Gnome as something to do with it as well but Linux can seem to get by on a lesser machine. Not to say this laptop is lesser, its a 2GHZ dual core machine and 1G should have this machine do circles around a jet. Needless to say, thats not the case. I guess its not totally surprising mac really seems to bling out the UI quite a bit. It just comes with the cost of needing more resources available. Compound that with the fact that I am a power user and virtualize a few instances at once and it might make more sense.
All that said I purchased 4 gigs of ram for this machine and it flies. Initial startup is slow but once everything is loaded its fast. One thing operating systems do to “fake out” that they booted ultra fast is get the window manager loaded and still boot up the rest of the OS. This basically makes the first minute or so of login slower than it should be. Id honestly prefer to login when everything is finished loading. I guess games need to be played with peoples minds about how fast an OS actually boots up so one OS doesn’t look bad. Linux is starting to do this more, so I guess since everyone is doing it….
So there you have it, for power use, Mac OS seems good around 4 gigs. Which is nut bag insane.
Pretty meet price.
**UPDATE** 4 gigs of RAM cost $89.
Photobooth
Posted by jdodson in humor, offhandstrangity on October 7, 2008
Since my blogging class heroes(thats you) might not subscribe to my twitter feed, here is my most recent twitter pic update. Taken with Mac’s photobooth a cool video/picture taking application.
Suits Explaining Open Source
Posted by jdodson in free software, offhandstrangity on October 7, 2008
In my new office there is a suit giving a talk about “Open Source.” Its not bad or anything and he is getting it mostly right but somehow it just seems strange to me.
Viva la capitalism. Seriously, thats not ironic. Come back later for a rant on irony.
Comments, Accounts and Twitter Posts.
Posted by jdodson in informative on October 3, 2008
You can now create an account on my blog. Reason why you may want that is because you must have one to comment. I am also making all my twitter posts for the day in one post so there is not a explosion of little posts.
Setting Up New Workflow
I have been using a refined workflow for 4-5 years on Linux. Switching that over to MacOS is pretty intense. Its not that MacOS can’t be wrangled to do it. Its that MacOS can’t be easily wrangled to do it.
For instance. I use sshfs to edit files remotely on Linux. I had to install MacFUSE and then symlink sshfs so I could script mounting remote drives. I also have to setup reverse SSH tunnels to getting into a Ubuntu Hardy instance in Virtualbox because it doesn’t support network hostmode when the Mac is using its wireless card.
Ive also had to install a junkload of extra programs and the like and getting it setup the way id like has been taking quite a bit of time. Again, its not that MacOS can’t do this stuff, its that I have to relearn how it can do that.
I think largely, I prefer the GNU toolchain to BSD’s toolchain. Enough things are different to make it annoying. Thats why I am virtualizing Ubuntu. I can just use that as my dev sandbox and do other smaller bits on the MacOS BSD toolchain. There is one silver lining of sorts though. I was able to install fink on MacOS to get a apt-get package manager on it. It has a small assortment of packages, nothing like Ubuntu, but it got gpg & subversion installed with no problems.
Now to get used to the default trackpad having no right click…..