Bye OS X

It might be funny to pick the day of the Intel Core 2011 Macbook Pro introduction to post this, but after two years of mostly enjoying OS X, and learning to program Objective-C, I'm going back to Windows. To be precise, I'm moving on to Windows 7, and not going back to Windows XP.

Oh, I love OS X and its Unixness, but there are just so many things that prevent me from being a happy and productive user. One of my biggest gripes is that I can't print to any of my networked printers except an older LaserJet that has a JetDirect card. But even with that printer, I have to manually select Tray 2 every single time, eventhough it's already set to Tray 2 by default both in Settings and in CUPS, but it doesn't work. Still, once in a while it would completely refuse to print, and I would just twiddle my thumbs until it would suddenly work again after a random number of hours, sometimes after days.

My MacBook is the early 2009 model upgraded with 4 GB of RAM and a 320 GB 7200 RPM hard drive, but it's just so unbearably slow. I try to avoid websites with Flash, since that just slows it down even more. I'm back to using an older ThinkPad X61 (the one I used to test all the Linux distributions). The X61 is 3.5 years old and only has 2 GB of RAM, but it's running circles around the MacBook. Oh, and the X61 is running Windows 7 Professional 64-bit, while the MacBook is running OS X 10.6.6.

I'm also back to using Firefox. Firefox was unusably slow on the Mac, so I changed to Safari like a good OS X user should, until I ran into problems with non-English filenames, then I switched Chrome. Chrome is really really nice, but it doesn't support automatic downloading using a download manager, and again, Flash is unusably slow. Flash is really fast on Safari, and Safari works with download managers, so I ended up having two web browsers open all the time.

I really miss iCal though.

Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1

Service Pack 1 for both Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 was out for Volume Licensing customers since last week, and was released into the wild earlier yesterday. I didn't have time earlier to download it from the Volume Licensing site, but I decided to take some time to download my updates today.

For some stupid reason the downloads keep getting stuck at exactly the same place every single time. For example, the Windows 7 Professional X64 English ISO, which is 3,181,668,352 bytes, always gets stuck at exactly 2,682,257,408 bytes, even if I use a download manager, even if I use Microsoft's own Java-based download manager, even if I use IE instead of Firefox. I tried downloading around the erroneous byte by using Flashget, but even when the file is 100% loaded, that single problem byte is still stuck and attempting to load it just gives me a server error. After trying numerous times, I looked at my firewall logs and noticed I've already downloaded over 100 gigabytes today, without getting anywhere.

Luckily, I still have The Pirate Bay at my disposal. So even though I'm a Volume Licensing customer for both Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, along with a whole bunch of other Microsoft products, I ended up having to download ISO's from The Pirate Bay. Arrrrrrrrrrr!

 

Update: after a few weeks, I went back to the Microsoft download site and still couldn't download the problem files. I found a place for leaving comments and left a comment, and a few days later, I could successfully download the files. I don't know if the problem was with Microsoft or with the local Akamai mirror on my ISP, but it's hard to imagine I was the only person with problems...

Science for adults

Robots are one of the most fascinating things ever, it's one thing to write programs to watch the flashing bits on a monitor, but it's completely different when you can program physical objects to destroy the world behave according to your instructions.

So, I've been drooling after the Lego Mindstorms NXT and the Arduino for ages, but I never bought into them since the NXT is so crazy expensive locally, and I couldn't find Arduino anywhere, and I don't want to risk having to pay through my nose for import tax, without having a little hands-on first.

Unfortuntaely, this kind of backwards thinking is not very good for me and I never got my robots, until I came across Vol. 27 of Otona no Kagaku (literally, Science for Adults) at the local Kinokuniya bookstore by pure chance. Vol. 27 includes a Japanino (an Arduino clone), an LED bar, and Japanese instructions for building a POV (persistence of vision) device. I can't read Japanese very well, but the Otona no Kagaku website has English instructions for download.

Since I'm relatively late to the Arduino game, there are literally millions of Arduino resources on the web at my disposal. I'm a hardware (PC) person, but I've never really been an electronics guy, I hope this will get me started.

Update (2011-02-18): I kept having trouble uploading sketches to the Japanino on my MacBook. It appears to be due to hardware design according to this page at Switch Science, and this page seems to describe USB overcurrent problems and how to fix it, but I'm just guessing since I can't really read Japanese.

Request more users

I received mail earlier today from Google announcing support for DKIM for all Google Apps editions. My boss has always complained that he couldn't send email to or receive email from his boss, and the IT people at his boss' company always refused to check their in-house email server for problems and keeps telling me to check my email server for problems.

Occam's razor moment. An in-house email server with hundreds of users vs. Google Apps. What are the chances the problem is on my end? DKIM doesn't really have anything to do with inability to receive mails, but I like to throw acronyms at my boss, so, I enabled DKIM on Google Apps and set my DNS accordingly, and on another tab, I was doing user transitions to the new Google Apps infrastructure. While I was doing this, I suddenly noticed on the Dashboard I can request for more users. The request for more users button was disabled a few years ago when Google Apps started the Premier Edition (now simply called Google Apps for Business) and since I already have 200 users I never actually needed more users. (Unlike new Google Apps users that can only get 50 users, I've been using Google Apps since 2006 and started with 100 users, and I've requested for 200 users in 2007.)

To make sure I wasn't imagining things, I googled and found this TechCrunch article, which is exactly what my dashboard looked like earlier. And just to make sure I'm not dreaming, I immedidately requested for 100 more users.

Yay!

Loving Linux Mint

(Continued from Part 2)

After trying openSUSE and Fedora and getting frustrated, I was almost ready to give up. Surely if people are trying to get Linux onto desktops, it should be easier than this? All those people that are saying Linux is ready for personal use must be delusional, or have really simple needs.

Anyway, my next was Ubuntu. Ubuntu is by far the most popular Linux distribution with a huge commercial backing. The installation screens of Ubuntu is also different from others in that it highlights Ubuntu's features instead of showing technical messages that most people probably won't understand.

Ubuntu has multi-lingual support built-in, but maybe because they don't have a lot of Asian developers, their selection of pre-installed input method are more than strange, to say the least, and the most commonly used Pinyin input, ibus-pinyin, isn't available by default, and none of those Chinese input selections in the screen below worked in a useful manner.

You might also think I'm easily discouraged. The thing is, I have no problems with using Windows or OS X in my daily work. I don't think Bill or Steve are the devil, and I use the right tool for the right job. I can easily learn to compile my own kernel or drivers, but I want to see how difficult it would be for an average person to get Linux going, without getting all frustrated.

Like Fedora, Ubuntu supports brightness and volume OSD out of the box, as well as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth toggling using Fn-F5. Trackpoing scrolling and sensitivity can be installed and configured the same way as Fedora.

The big surprise was for Active Protection System, which I couldn't get to work in Fedora. In Ubuntu, both tp_smapi (called tp-smapi-dkms) and hdaps are available in the repo. After installing them from the repo, APS worked right away without additional configuration.

I was almost going keep Ubuntu when I went to uninstall Evolution. I don't use a desktop mail client, so Evolution is no use for me, but when I tried to remove it, Software Center also wants to uninstall ubuntu-desktop as well, which is probably not a very good idea. Evolution is just too integrated with Ubuntu to make a full and clean uninstallation possible.

Next and final in queue, Linux Mint.

Ubuntu and Linux Mint are almost exactly the same thing. Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu but with somewhat different pre-installed applications and themes (Thunderbird instead of Evolution, Pidgin instead of Empathy, and it's green instead of brown), the partner repo is pre-enabled, and video codecs are pre-installed instead of auto-installation on first use.

Linux Mint's Software Manager is a lot like Ubuntu's Software Center. But it adds community reviews and stars, which sounds like a good idea at first, until you see the reviews for programs like Adobe Reader which is really useful for enterprise users like me, but typical "fanbois" would hate. I think this is Linux Mint's only drawback, and I wish there's a way to use the Software Manager without seeing those amateur reviews and scores.

In conclusion, I've been using Linux Mint for a couple of weeks now. As of this writing Ubuntu 10.10 is out, and I imagine a new version of Linux Mint would be coming soon.

(To be continued...)

Skype

7 million Skype users are online, and none of them are my friends. Skype has been down for almost 24 hours, and my phone has been ringing off the hook since this morning from desperate users who can't get in touch with their friends or customers. It's amazing for my users to realize how much they depend on technology when they're suddenly cut off from it.

I most definitely wouldn't want to be a member of Skype's IT team right now.