October 27, 2007
Leopard
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Well, I finally took the plunge. After yesterday’s problems installing it on my iBook, I took all the precautions that I can and took the plunge and installed it on my iMac.
Steps:
- Buy a 1 TB drive from Costco.
- Plug it in and realize it’s dead.
- Exchange 1TB drive at Costco.
- Plug it in and it works!
- Check main drive using DiskWarrior
- Make a bootable backup using Superduper
- Install Leopard by doing an ‘Upgrade’ install.
Done!
All my settings seem to be working. Had a hiccup with my keychain. For whatever reason Leopard didn’t read it properly. But strangely, even though I created a new keychain with the same name, the new - supposedly empty - keychain had all my old passwords!
I haven’t bumped into any incompatibility yet with any of the software that I use regularly:
- Path Finder
- BBEdit
- PowerMail
- Interarchy
- Hogwasher
- Vienna
- Adium
- SpamSieve
- Ulysses
- Photoshop
So far so good. The only thing that needed work to get it back up to its previous working status was my Apache/PHP/Mysql.
October 26, 2007
Leopard, Software Review
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Well, after my first attempt at installing Leopard by doing a normal ‘Update’ on the previous system, I couldn’t get the Finder to respond, no matter what I did.
I changed strategy and re-installed by doing an ‘Erase and Install’.
‘Erase and install’ worked perfectly.
It took about 45 minutes to install from scratch, excluding all printer drivers. I don’t use the laptop for anything other than managing the site, internet access and email while on the road; so printing is not needed at all. That saves nearly 3 GB of hard disk space.
After that I went through the step by step setup and created my user account and internet setup. Everything went smoothly. Setting the system’s preferences to my own settings took about 20 minutes.
My main reason for this test install is to test if my site management software works with the new system. Great news for me, it works flawlessly.
I performed few tests. In each instance my software downloaded and extracted submissions; formatted them and re-uploaded them to the server. So from that point of view, my mind is at ease with regards to leopard. Everything else on my system is not crucial. Even if there were some bugs, they won’t matter much. The important things work.
I’m still not sure about upgrading the iMac. I can’t do an erase and install on it without wasting few days getting back to my old setup. I may try the archive and install option instead.
For the record, this is the first time an ‘update’ style upgrade of any version of the Mac OS fails. I’ve been a Mac user for the last 22 years. Also, this is the first time I ever attempted to do an upgrade on a system that barely meets the minimum hardware requirements for the new system. So that may have something to do with the failure.
Leopard is a very slick cat so far.
October 26, 2007
Leopard
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Today, at 10:30 am EDT, the Purolator guy dropped off the tiny package. Leopard is packaged in what have recently become Apple’s standard software package. A box barely larger than the DVD is housing the new system, along with a small booklet.
At 10:40 I had started the install on my non-essential iBook (G4, 1.42 Ghz 512 MB of RAM). With its paltry 512 MB memory, the iBook meets the minimum system requirement for Leopard.
It took 20 minutes to verify that the installation DVD is good (a good thing to do on the first use of the DVD). Total installation time on the iBook one hour and 28 minutes. The last minute (that’s when the installer progress bar reports ‘about 1 minute remaining) lasted about 18 actual minutes.
Once the installer was done, the iBook booted to the log in screen in three minutes.
From the log in screen to the Setup Assistant, 2 min, 40 sec.
After the smooth sailing through the installation and the reboot and the setup assistant, things became frustrating.
When the setup assistant declared that everything was done, including registration, the main menu bar showed up, the Dock showed up but the Finder was completely non-responding. I clicked Safari’s icon in the Dock and it launched, connected to the net and worked perfectly. First impression of Safari (3.04) is that it’s blazing fast, even on a busy, minimal machine.
The Finder still not responding.
I launched Terminal and started ‘top’. It reported no processor activity on the Finder, but the ‘mds’ and ‘mdworker’ were going crazy (mds is the main process for Spotlight and it launches an ‘mdworker’ process each time it needs to index something). Spotlight was re-indexing the drive.
By mistake, I clicked on the new ‘Downloads’ folder in the new Dock and the Dock became unresponsive. Not good so far.
I force quit the Finder and things improved a bit. Quicksilver launched after the Finder reloaded. The Dock is still stuck. I force quit that too. However, the Finder is still non-responsive.
It seems the Finder won’t respond until Spotlight is finished indexing the main drive (60 GB). That’s a crappy design if it is intentional.
After an hour or so, I lost patience and force rebooted the computer (the shutdown and restart menu items produced no results).
I rebooted the laptop using the installation DVD and checked the drive. All clear.
Rebooted again and this time the menu bar didn’t show up and the dock is non responsive. I can’t launch anything else. I can hear the hard disk whirring away. Spotlight indexing is proceeding.
I clicked on the Spotlight icon in the non-existant menu bar and it showed a panel telling me about Spotlight and showing a progress bar reporting 2 hours left of indexing.
So, so far, not very encouraging. The laptop doesn’t have any documents on it. So if indexing is taking this long on the system files and the applications (mostly standard), then I would be very, very hesitant to install it on my iMac, which has millions of files on it.
So, to sum it up: Leopard first impression on iBook 1.42 Ghz G4 with 512 MB of RAM: CRAP!
I’ll wait for Spotlight to finish and then try to get a second impression.
October 26, 2007
Rant
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Well, I’m excited about Leopard (Apple’s new OS), and of course, I pre-ordered it as soon as Apple started accepting pre-orders.
It’s supposed to come in tomorrow on the 26th, and indeed, I received my notification of shipment from Apple with a tracking number. However, the tracking web page is nearly useless. Here is what I get on Purolator’s tracking page:
2007/10/25 18:58 Shipment In Transit
2007/10/25 18:57 Received
2007/10/24 08:30 Shipment In Transit
So I get that it’s somewhere in the world and it changed hands once so far.
October 17, 2007
Opinion, iPhone
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After Apple’s announcement and subsequent release of the iPhone and later the iPod Touch, my brother and friends bitched about Apple’s stupidity and Steve Jobs’s control freakiness. They all complained about Apple’s unwillingness to allow or even encourage third party development of native iPhone applications.
Over the last few months, many, many articles have been written about the subject, mostly bemoaning Apple’s stance. Even Apple’s competitors in the cell business (namely Nokia) latched on to this and proclaimed that their phones are ‘Open to anything’, unlike the iPhone.
After few of such discussions with my brother and various other friends, I made a bet with all of them that as soon as Leopard is released, Apple will announce and then make available a native SDK (Software Development Kit) for the iPhone.
I made that bet on a logical rationale that my friends denied.
After the iPhone came out, it became widely known that it was running a version of Leopard. Since the Mac’s version of Leopard was still in Alpha stage at the time, it only made sense that the iPhone was running an Alpha version too.
Since Apple had set a June deadline to release the iPhone that meant they had to make sure that it works reliably. Which means that they chose a fairly stable build of the Leopard Alpha, fixed as many bugs as they could to insure stable and solid operation of the phone, made sure that their own applications on the phone are not stumbling on any bugs and they released that.
When working with an alpha-grade system, an SDK is nearly impossible. If I were Apple, I wouldn’t want to expose the inner working of an alpha-grade system to outside developers either.
Now that Leopard reached release status, that means all the features have been finalized and the code has reached an acceptable stability level. So now a native SDK has become feasible (Finally!).
However, Apple is still cautious. Just like prudent users who don’t install and use a .0 release on a mission critical system, Apple is taking its time to finalize and release the SDK. They’ve set the date of the release to sometime in February. That would give them time to iron out the majority of the big bugs that will crop out as soon as Leopard is released.
The iPhone’s SDK will be based on Leopard version 10.5.2 or 10.5.3. Of course the iPhone’s firmware will be updated to reflect the more mature version of Leopard available.
Now all we need is a firm date for the availability of the iPhone in Canada.