What's it all about, Alfie?

I read this morning from Apple Insider about the expectation to see massive design changes in the MacBook and MacBook Pro come mid-year. The primary reason seems to be the fact that the design hasn't changed, and so I'm a little leery, but it does make sense, if Apple is trying to sell more machines. Make them look different, and people will update.

I suppose it'll be nice, but I can't see buying one just because the case is nicer or the trackpad is bigger. I want more cores and more memory - make it a quad-core, 8GB RAM machine and then I'm buying.

Yes... that would be a great upgrade.

One of the nice things I like about Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) is the new way that X11 is launched. With launchd it's just a matter of a second or two when X11 tries to connect back and it's launched. Excellent. But it's not perfect.

When you close X11, it prompts you for a confirmation dialog, and there's no preference setting to say "don't confirm close". But some clever individual found a hidden defaults setting that does just that.

  defaults write org.x.x11 no_quit_alert -bool YES

And then the next time you launch X11 it'll not ask you 'are you sure?' when you want to quit. Nice.

Hey, this is good news! The latest version of WebKit has passed the Acid3 test with a 100/100 score. I'm looking forward to seeing that in a Safari update sometime soon. It's standards, and that means next to nothing, but it's nice to see that WebKit was the first to score the top prize first.

Yes, this is an excellent platform. I'm reminded of the TED talk and the statement What are you going to do today that's worthy of me?. Gotta love Apple and the Macs. Great tools.

This weekend already I've had more than my normal share of surprises. There was the GCC bug I found, and then late yesterday as I was taking a break from that I realized that my iMac G5 was frozen. I mean like a poster frozen. So I power-cycled it and it came back - for about 5 mins.

Crud. I can't have this guy die! This is important stuff to me.

So I took off the back and reseated the memory. Tried it again... same thing. Uh oh... not good.

I was thinking last night "Disk drive - it's the only mechanical thing to wear out. I'll get another tomorrow and put it in." And I left my office for the night.

But as I thought more about it that evening, I was convinced that it couldn't possibly be the disk drive. If it were, there would be a normal message on the boot-up about a "sad mac" and a bad disk. I've had this before on other models, so I know what it looks like. No, this appeared to be something far more insidious. Like the system board.

So I put the drive in, and closed it up and took it to the Apple Store at Oak Brook. Because I had an appointment with the Genius Bar I only waited about 15 mins. Not bad, really. They hooked up a keyboard and mouse and did a dump of the machine to their diagnostics site there - whatever it is and looked at the report.

"Well... how long have you had the memory?" he asked.

"Since I got the machine." I said - wondering what was up.

"Well, it's the memory or the System Board. I have a new System Board in stock, but let's see... the cost for that will be $900 plus tax."

Crud. Well, it's less than a new iMac, and I mentioned that to him.

"Not by much", he shot back.

So I looked around the store, and he was right. For basically $1200 I could get a new dual-core iMac and have a faster, better machine.

Double Crud. I loved my G5 and planned on keeping it for years. But it was clear that the smart thing to do was to get a new iMac.

And so I did.

It's basically the same machine - a 20" iMac with 2GB RAM and a 320GB drive. It's got all the same standard things my G5 did, but updated to the latest from Apple. It's got the nice display, and boy is it really nice, but the nicest thing about this machine was something I wasn't expecting - the new keyboard.

Basically, this is a laptop keyboard for a desktop machine. It's thin and sleek and feels wonderful. Really, I knew they were out, but I hadn't played with them for any length of time, but when I started working with it, I was floored how nice it was. Smooth as glass... wonderful feel... I'm a very picky keyboard-kind-of-guy and this was stunning. Amazing.

So I got everything back on the machine based on my TimeMachine backup, and that was a very pleasant surprise, and in less than half a day I was back in business. I think I'll still try to make the G5 work - maybe with another G5 from eBay or something with a good logic board. But I can't imagine giving it up - not just yet.

[3/7/08] UPDATE: I worked on this guy today and I'm convinced that it's a thermal problem. The machine will run fine for about 1 to 5 mins (depending on the temperature of the box) and then it'll lock up. Video is fine, all LEDs inside the box are fine, tried new memory and hard disk - no difference. It's the logic board for sure, and it's a drag that it's thermal in nature. It's not a cold solder joint as that would not allow the start... it's something that's 'in spec' at lower temps, and the fans don't kick on fast enough to keep the temp in the box below that level. I think it's the CPU to be sure, but can't be 100% positive without a swap. Bummer. Don't know what I'll be able to do with this guy - if anything.

I've noticed this issue with my MacBook Pro's keyboard ever since the update with Leopard - if you let the machine sit for a bit, no need to let it go to sleep, just let it sit for 5 mins, and then hit the keyboard, the first key will be ignored. Seems I'm not the only one to notice. The friendly guys at Apple have seen this and released an update.

One of the most interesting things about this update is that it requires no reboot in order to be put in place. Pretty slick. I should be able to see the difference today, and I'll sure be looking, but I'm guessing the problem is fixed - which is just great.

I've been waiting for this for a while now, and I have to say that I'm really pleased so far with the update. I got the huge 10.5.2 update and then the Leopard Video update, and then the iLife update. Busy updating day.

Some things I"ve noticed already:

• Terminal.app - opening multiple windows at start-up now doesn't leave some of them hanging. Nice.
• TimeMachine - the little menu icon is nice - not earth-shaking, but nice.

I haven't had a lot of time to play with things, but when I do, if I see more things worth writing about, I'll jot them down. For now, it's nice to look at the release notes and see all the work they put into it.

UPDATE: new hidden preferences feature was reported here that keeps Spaces in 10.5.2 from moving to the Space with the application on it when switching to that app. This is something that I didn't like about Spaces originally. I'd want to open a new editor window and when I clicked on the icon on the Dock, I'd automatically go to the Space where that application was already open. Now I don't have to have that happen. I click on the app and I stay on the Space I'm on. Excellent.

To set this up, simply go to the Terminal.app and say:

  defaults write com.apple.Dock workspaces-auto-swoosh -bool NO
  killall Dock

and it's ready to go. To reverse it, make the NO a YES.

Well... it's hit my minimum size for a new iPod - 32GB. Apple today announced the new 32GB iPod Touch. It's very very tempting as I've wanted to have something that can play my movies and pod casts on the train when I get a little tired of reading my book at the time.

At $499, it's steep, I'll grant you, but it's still exactly what I wished they had released the first time. And with WiFi and the new apps, it'll be a lot more useful than the original 'Touch'.

Yes, very temping indeed. I may have to go to the Apple store this weekend and pick one up. It's just exactly what I wanted to get.

It's not that every keynote needs to have something for me. I didn't really expect anything from this one - based on the rumor sites, and I wasn't surprised. I like the Time Capsule, and I think the MacBook Air has an audience (it's not me, but it's got an audience), and while I like the option of movie rentals, I have that in Comcast OnDemand, so there's nothing new there.

The addition of the apps to the iPhone and iPod Touch are nice, but since I don't have either, I'm not impacted by the announcement. I was a little taken aback by the $20 fee for the iPod Touch users, but I guess they have to sell it for something - like the 802.11n update for Tiger. I did think that $20 is steep, but what the heck... it's the cost of early adoption.

I will say that the only thing that looks even remotely like something I might get is the Time Capsule. The problem there is that the drive is contained in the box. It'd be great to be able to configure the unit to use a network drive - or let Time Machine use a network drive itself, so that I wasn't stuck with their drives.

I want to put in a RAID 5 system with lots of expansion, and that's not in the cards at this time with this solution. Well... maybe soon enough, they'll have some update for this to Time Machine. Until then, I don't really mind the cord all that much. It's an inexpensive solution to a hard problem that I really like having with me.

One of the things I like to do when I've made changes to several files in a CVS directory - and haven't yet checked them in, is to make a tarball (a .tgz file) of them so that I can move them to another machine for testing. For example, working on cross-platform code, it's nice to get it working on one platform and then move it to the next and verify it before checking it in. This way all the changes for the modification are in the one CVS check-in.

I wanted to make a simple alias for TCSH that did this on my Mac. I was doing it all the time and it just seemed smart to finally do this right once and then just use it from here on out. The problem I got into were these "Apple Dot" files (._file) that tar was including in the tarball even though they weren't listed in the list of files to include - nor could I exclude them with the command options.

So I did some googling and found the COPYFILE_DISABLE environment setting in Leopard. If this is set to 'true', then these Apple Dot files will not be copied. But, since I didn't want to make a big change to all my shells, I decided to simply make it defined for the one command.

Finally, then, here is the alias:

  alias tcu 'setenv COPYFILE_DISABLE true; tar zcvf \!* `cvs -q update |
      grep -v \^\? | sed -e "s/^[AM] //g"`; unsetenv COPYFILE_DISABLE'

(it's all one line, of course)

I was watching this TED talk by J.J. Abrams entitled The mystery box, and he was talking about the unlimited possibilities of a blank page, and his love affair with Apple computers. He pointed to his Powerbook and said:

This machine is great. It's like it's looking at me and saying What are you going to do today that's worthy of me?

I share that feeling completely. I've had the 17" Powerbook since it was first created. Now I have a 17" MacBook Pro, and I think I'll always have the best laptop Apple makes. It's just a feeling of the quality of the hardware and the software. The feeling that there's just about nothing I can't do on this guy. It's the creative palette that really does allow you to achieve your best. And in that, it's expecting you to give it your very best efforts as well.

And there are certainly more days than I can remember looking at the screen of this machine and feel it look back at me with the same feeling: what are you going to do today, Bob, that's as good as this? I've listened to Steve's keynotes and they are of that same tone - these are the machines of the dreamers... the creative professionals that will shape thought... change the world. What are you doing that's like that? I just love it to pieces.