I used to use my PowerMac G4/450 AGP “Sawtooth” as my home server, handling storing files (backups, or long-term offloading), time-consuming processes like long downloads (developer tools, Linux ISOs, etc.), and home music and such. For what it did, it did it very well and I was pleased. The one thing it could not do, especially with only 450MHz to spend, was video playback on the television. I’d‘ve had to had a card with TV out and a processor upgrade to handle the latest media and so on, and that was unlikely to happen.

However, Apple released the Intel-based Mac mini many months ago and I saw the future in that little machine — well, at least my future. I snatched one up, threw out the DVD player and took all the external drives from the huge G4 and put it all into the entertainment center with the mini, saving about two cubic feet of space. Since then, Front Row has been amazing for what I use that for.

I’m leaving my current job and starting a new one here soon. As a part of the job I’ve been issued (yes, a bit early) a MacBook Pro for home/office use. Actually, there’s a way to buy it off the company and I think I’ll be looking at that.

What gets me is that I’ve been using an iBook since about early 2003. The original was replaced with an iBook G4 at one point, but it’s really just the same little machine with some additional horsepower. The iBook is a weak and tired little machine in comparison. Up until now I’ve been happily complacent with the 12” screen and the “fast enough” processor and graphics card. Most everything I needed to do, I could do on that little machine. In fact, I’m quite proud to say I managed to live in 30GB of drive space for many years without exploding too much over the rim (I offloaded data to a home server now and again, and deleted the other things like download archives or whatnot).

I have a new design rule: Three pieces of embedded media, at most.

This, at least, holds true for large sites on smaller servers. The reason being that MG managed to get Dugg yet again but this time (unlike the last) it took the server down again. In spite of all my previous tweaking. Why?

A big part of the Slashdot Effect (first come, first named) is the number of hits to your server. MySQL and Drupal caching get you absolutely nowhere if you’re loading 20 pieces of media per page when the traffic comes. At peak, this time, we had 10 hits per second to the server. Most of those were media. I’d added some little graphic badges to the bottom of the page and every post had four service icons (for, ironically, posting stories to Digg…) and other little things. Those caused most of the damage. The server was pushing the HTML out instantly, as it was tweaked to, but the images were a whole other story because they were not in memory, but on-disk. So, there are three solutions I’m going to look into for this:

Well, I never thought this day would come. No, not writing another opinion piece, but me actually comparing Apple to TiVo in an opposing style. Yet, with all the hype over this rumored Front Row 2.0 it’s all I can do but compare it to TiVo and see who will own my living room.

Apple is supposedly prepping a release of Front Row with vague-at-this-point DVR-like abilities and is being dubbed a “TiVo Killer.” That remains to be seen, because TiVo just announced in their email newsletter some new features that would set it far, far apart from anything Apple’s added to Front Row.

Came across an absolutely excellent web package today that’s making life a lot easier for me when working on the Core Data conversion for Notae. Trac is a Python-based solution that brings together a Wiki, an issue reporter database, and your Subversion repository into one integrated tool without bloat.

No, really.

I’m working towards beta on Notae (just going to get the old features in the new body for now) and this will be an amazing tool for getting things organized. Well worth checking out for those burned by Mantis’ over-flexibility for smaller projects.

This is the second CP podcast. The same RSS feed should work in whatever podcasting program you use, or you can download the attached file (bottom).

I was wrong. Gruber was wrong. Most of the Mac Web was wrong. The mainstream media was right. Hell is quite a bit chillier now, all things considered.

I could try to hold on to the idea of the PowerPC as the best choice for Apple and to find some way to lament this change; to blame the powers-that-be and call for a return to the technically-superior PowerPC line of processors. It’s really rather tempting, honestly. All the propaganda we’ve read over the years about Mac vs. PC always landed on the cleanliness of the PPC design and how it was a technically-superior processor. We know it has a shorter pipeline, it doesn’t have a ton of hacks to try and run older code, it (used to) use less power and generate less heat. We know this. We know it’s a good chip.

More than that, we know the industry knows it’s a good chip. All three major game console makers are going with a variant of IBM’s PPC chip for their next-gen game consoles (and they’re running at over 3 GHz, no less). Microsoft even used Apple’s G5s to develop for the platform. It really looked like PPC was going to be big.

I’ve having a hell of a time playing with the internals of Spotlight. I have some more articles coming, but a quick and dirty one that goes over how I’m finding out the niftiest things to do was just posted on Mac Geekery. The alternative to the above article is to just use mdfind in Terminal, but that’s no fun because you don’t get the pretty categorized results and so on. Anyhow, enjoy.

Just installed a new kernel extension to get that two-finger scrolling on an iBook G4. Works like a charm. The one that handles both methods is a little screwy because it switches to X/Y mode as you’re making circles and the scroll kind of jitters, so get both of them and test each one to see which you like better. I’ve found the X/Y one to be the best, which is also, coincidentally, the mode Apple chose for the new PBs.

Two curious things about that *mt2drupal* script: * All the comment counts were zero. * None of the imported articles are indexed by the search module. The first I fixed by taking the output of this and putting it into a CSV file: SELECT COUNT(nid) as count, nid FROM comments GROUP BY nid; In BBEdit I took that file and turned a line like this: 40, 1145 Into this: REPLACE INTO node_comment_statistics SET comment_count=40, nid=1145; Ran the file and all the counts were updated. The code for *mt2drupal* could use a bugfix for that one. (I'm sure, in hindsight, someone could re-write that with sub-selects but I've used MySQL so long I've stop thinking about things like that.) The search bug I'm still hunting down. Ideas? New articles index fine but imported ones do not...

Software from different suppliers brings up to some peculiar bugs, such as a heater turning itself on during a hot summer day. In December last year ABI Research estimated that roughly 30% of all warranty issues with new cars were microprocessor- and software-related.
Slashdot | If The Problem Persists, Reboot The Car

Why am I surprised? My wife’s car is mechanically-sound but the brake, check engine, and some other light have been stuck on for months because we refuse to pay the money to reset the car’s computer to make them go out.

Then, of course, there’s the story of the dude that got trapped in his Beemer when the computer failed. Nah, power steering’s about as advanced as I want it. Sadly, I don’t have that choice much anymore, unless I get a pickup or something. All passenger cars are pansied-out.