April 30, 2006
FlickrExport
Uploading some photos with the latest version of FlickrExport, 1.3.4, and I'm loving the new progress bar for individual file uploads. Massive improvement!April 26, 2006
Macbook benchmarking
The thread that won't die - benchmarking the Macbooks. I've now got 2gb in this machine, so it was time to re-run the tests.
With Cocoon 2.1.8 on my machine:
rm -rf build; ./build.sh webapp
[...]
BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 1 minute 11 seconds
On Maurizio's Macbook Pro, identical spec to mine:
Total time: 1 minute 21 seconds
On Gabriele's new Sony Vaio running Ubuntu:
Total time: 1 minute 30 seconds
Gianugo got hold of a 1.83GHz Macbook:
Total time: 1 minute 16 seconds
On Jeroen's Dell centrino laptop running Windows and Cocoon 2.1.9 (and no virus checker):
Total time: 1 minute 41 seconds
On Jeroen's Dell desktop running Windows and Cocoon 2.1.9 (and a virus checker):
Total time: 9 minutes 40 seconds
With Cocoon 2.1.9 on my machine:
Total time: 1 minute 23 seconds
So ... I still have a hot, vibrating, buggy laptop. But it's fast.
April 25, 2006
More Apple trouble
More problems with the laptop - a kernel panic when trying to suspend this morning:
panic(cpu 0 caller 0x0019CAEF): Unresolved kernel trap (CPU 0, Type 0=divide error)
I'll find out this afternoon if I have a "special" laptop or not, as there'll be another identical machine in the office to compare against.
Meanwhile, Gianugo reports that a lower-spec Macbook (1.83Ghz) builds Cocoon in 1m16s, which means mine is slower than it should be. Hrmm.
April 20, 2006
Replacing Microsoft Office with Apache Cocoon
An interesting article over on zdnet on how to displace Microsoft Office:
I'm not aware of anything that you can do within the Microsoft ecosystem that you can't do at least as well, but more reliabily and for a lot less per document, using Cocoon
It's slightly disingenuous to suggest incoming documents can be converted and reformatted without significant challenges, but I certainly agree with the idea of Cocoon as a repurposing and republishing tool, assuming you can get your data into a suitable starting format such as XML.
April 18, 2006
MacBook Pro
It's not all bad, after all. Things are looking up. After doing a manual migrate of my data onto a clean clean install, the MacBook appears to be flying along quite nicely thank you very much.
Yesterday when I tried the obligatory compilation test, the best I got was 1 minute 52 seconds. The first time I ran it this evening, I got 1 minute 19 seconds - much better!
The laptop is still running hot, but the vibration appears to be gone. Perhaps the cycle ride back from the office shook something back into place?
Somewhere along the way I managed to reclaim 15gb of disk space by manually migrating, which probably means I've forgotten to copy across a few applications.
Incidentally, quite a few apps are available in Universal Binary format (either formal releases or unofficial development builds), including (in the order I installed them) Universal Mozilla apps: Thunderbird, Firefox, Camino; Quicksilver, Gmail Notifier, MenuMeters, Unison, Transmit, Alarm Clock, Subversion, Q, VLC, Adium, OpenOffice.org, Eclipse 3.2RC1, SubEthaEdit, NetNewsWire, Omnigraffle Pro, Omnioutliner, Superduper!, TextMate, Salling Clicker.
Notable omissions (but working just fine anyway) include Ecto, Tinkertool, SlimBatteryMonitor, wClock.
Notable omissions because I haven't reinstalled them: PathFinder. I suspect PathFinder caused at least some of the performance issues in the last installation.
No doubt there'll be more applications and tweaks to install, but I think I have a usable workable system to get me through the rest of the week now.
MacBook Woe
I bought a MacBook Pro last week, on my way back from Oxford. If you've been wondering why I've been kinda quiet, it's because I've been coming to terms with what a disaster this laptop is.
So, first impressions, roughly transcribed from iChat conversations with others while I set it up:
- Big battery and big PSU on this thing. Both are significantly bigger than on the Powerbook.
- The remote reminds me of a cigarette lighter, or an iPod Shuffle that was stamped on.
- Speakers are much different to the Powerbook - richer sound, more spatial.
- It vibrates (more on this later).
- Nice big touchpad, much larger than on the Powerbook.
- Photo booth: genius.
- Spotlight is usable! (When compared to the type-n-wait disaster it was on the Powerbook)
- I wonder how much money Apple are going to make on lost remotes?
- There's a bug: Frontrow hangs if you run it without having run iTunes, because iTunes shows a software license agreement prompt the first time it runs.
- 15 minutes in and I got the pizza wheel of death :-( iTunes won't quit, and "Force Quit" won't display.
- It doesn't seem significantly faster, but then it's a clean install with nothing to test yet.
- Photobooth is genius. Laugh-out-loud genius. Too much fun.
On Friday, I nuked the Macbook's disk and did a clean reinstall (to omit various extraneous software packages I didn't need (printer drivers, language packs, Garageband, iMovie), saving disk space). I then migrated my data from the old Powerbook, and was impressed with how smoothly it went. After copying, I logged in, and my Powerbook's desktop was there, running on the new machine. All my data and most of my applications had made it across, too.
After further investigation, however, it appears the migration tool is patchy and misses some crucial data. For example, NetInfo Manager is missing a number of custom-defined machine details. Internet Connect no longer has any of my VPN details. This is a bit annoying, as most of those details on the Powerbook are now separated from me by about 100 miles of sea.
I spent the weekend on and off doing stuff on the laptop. By Monday, I'd come to the conclusion that my laptop was slow, buggy, hot, laggy, and vibrating permanently.
Slow: in the speed test with Paul's laptop, he got 1 minute 21 seconds to do a clean build of Cocoon. For me, it takes anywhere from 1 minute 52 seconds to 2 minutes 39 seconds.
Buggy: some programs are exhibiting weird behaviour: for example, I can't drag and drop photos into new albums in iPhoto, menumeters has a habit of dying quietly. From time to time, the Superdrive arbitrarily decides to try and eject, even if there's nothing in there. Path Finder is hopelessly slow. And yes, wherever possible or available I am running Universal Binary versions of these applications.
Hot: it becomes uncomfortable to rest my hands on the laptop, and the rear left corner of the laptop gets painfully hot to touch. There doesn't appear to be anything using excessive amounts of CPU, so there's no obvious reason for lots of heat to be generated.
Laggy: using option-tab to change applications often results in a very noticeable pause. At random intervals I get the pizza wheel. Sometimes I can be typing into Adium, and I have to pause to wait for my words to appear.
Vibrating: the vibration is the sort of low, constant, unpleasant vibration that leads to numb, painful fingers. No-one else I've spoken to has seen anything like it, so I'll be popping to one of the Apple shops in Amsterdam this week to see if it's even remotely normal.
I spoke to Apple support, and they got me to power-cycle and then hold the power button down for 5 seconds, presumably to reset something in the firmware. It didn't make much difference. Apple want me to send the machine back to them, with at least one week turnaround time - not really an option as I don't have the old Powerbook with me.
Tonight I'm going to try doing a clean install, and migrate my data across by hand, rather than trusting the Apple migration tool. I should at least be able to reclaim some disk space this way.
April 13, 2006
OSS Watch: Open Source and Sustainability
Some of my pictures from the OSS Watch conference are now on flickr. Everyone's photos are available via the osswatch200604 tag.
I'll be writing some thoughts about the conference just as soon as I dig my way through the todo list. A short summary though: very good and superbly organised.
April 7, 2006
New Cocoon release
The latest release of cocoon, 2.1.9, is being released by Carsten as we speak. It should be available on the mirrors shortly for download.April 6, 2006
Mac-print-fu
This week when trying to add a new printer I kept getting this annoying error:
server-error-service-unavailable
It turns out this is a known error, and there's a knowledgebase article on it. I'm always mystified when this sort of thing happens: if it's a known problem, and there's a documented solution, why does the error that appears not provide the URL of the article about it? Hrmph.
April 4, 2006
April 3, 2006
Albania
So I survived my trip to Albania, and I'm back in Amsterdam again. While I wait for iPhoto and flickrexport to do their thing, I'll post my thoughts.
First of all, as usual, I loved Tirana. No real surprise there - I've yet to travel to a new city that I actively disliked. Throw in some sunshine, and as far as I'm concerned you have a winning recipe. I'd like to publicly thank the wonderful folks at OSS Watch, who passed on my name to the UNDP, since none of them were able to make it.
The workshops seemed to go ok, and I had a fair amount of time in the afternoons and evenings to explore the city. I must have walked quite a few miles during the days I was there, and I think I saw pretty much all of the city centre. It's a huge city and quite spread out.
The UNDP's office was based in the Sky Tower, an eighteen storey tower block with a convenient terrace on top, from which I took many photos. It was just a few streets away from my hotel, which made for a very pleasant walk in the mornings and afternoons. Hotel Broadway itself was excellent, I'd have no hesitation recommending it to anyone else heading to Tirana. Spacious clean rooms, and friendly staff.
Most of the people I saw in Tirana were smiling, happy, and friendly. This, despite the fact that it's one of the poorest countries I've ever been to, second only to Ethiopia (oh, 43places is great by the way - you can see an updated map of where I've been, that's somewhat slicker than the world66 version used in that travel meme). The difference even between Serbia and Albania was stark - Albania is still struggling with some basic infrastructure issues whilst Serbia seems to mostly have those covered. For example, just counting the number of backup electricity generators you can see in each country gives you a feel for how well things are(n't) going.
So it's ironic that people in Albania seemed happier than in Serbia. Maybe it was the warmer climate (I certainly felt happier there). That's not to say the Serbians were miserable - they weren't, they were incredibly hospitable - just that Albanian life seemed more relaxed.
Tirana was a city with several faces. Early morning, it felt brisk and snappy as people hurried to their jobs. By mid-afternoon, it was coffee time, with everyone sitting back relaxing. After dark, the city totally changed appearance with neon everywhere and throngs of people walking up and down the streets, talking and laughing.
There was of course an ugly side to the city as well. The less fortunate live in extremes of poverty far worse than in so called developed countries. It was a common sight to see young children sorting through garbage bins looking for cardboard boxes that would make convenient houses. Or the romany gypsies living on the edge of the city in single-room houses built from whatever other people had thrown away. I'm sure many people have written far more eloquently about this than I can, so I'll say no more.
To summarise, Albania is a fascinating place full of wonderful people, and well worth a visit. I've uploaded an Albania set of pictures to flickr which hopefully give a feel for the place.