Personal

MacBook wake up network problems

I'm having trouble lately waking up my MacBook Pro. The wired network cable is dead when I do this. So far, I've been rebooting which fixes it. It looks like if I put it to sleep with the wired connection attached when it has no network when it wakes up. I have no issues with wireless access when I use it that way, it's just the wired ethernet which has the problem.

Macs make developers more productive?

It appears so at least around here. We were doing rebuilds of ObjectGrid modules yesterday and we had another members T60p and my MacBook Pro and the MacBook built the same module from a cold cache around 8x faster. 1 minute 12 on the Mac versus over 10 minutes on the T60. Both are first time builds. It seems to be all disk based optimizations. CPU wise, there isn't that much in it. Looks like MacOS just does file I/O more efficiently.

Main issues with a MacBook

It's been a couple of months now and I'm still happy I switched. This entry just documents the issues that I've seen.

Bigger hard drive
First one is I should have gotten the bigger drive, 250GB. I'm out of disk space now and I want to make VM ware virtual machines and they are just big.

15 inch or 17 inch
It doesn't really matter. On a plane in economy you aren't using any laptop once the person in front leans their seat back so I don't think the size is a big deal. The 17 inch screen is nice when working on it at home etc.

Dont upgrade to Leopard... yet...
I've had panics and application crashes more since I upgraded. I had no panics at all pre-leopard and now I get them maybe one a week. Nothing manic but annoying none the less. Time machine is the coolest thing about leopard I think though.

Safari still isn't a very good browser.
IE is better as is firefox. I find sites that don't render correctly on safari which pushes me to use firefox.

No Java 6
Apple seem to have forgotten Java developers with Mac OSX. Leopard comes with a Sun Java 5, I think 1.5.0.11 but its pretty old in the tooth now.

Buy VMware fusion not Parallels
I've had parallels panic the machine after failing to allocate contiguous memory and no issues with vmware plus it's cheaper. Most people at IBM use vmware so making vm images with that makes more sense as others get the benefit.

Office for the Mac
Why don't the arrow keys work properly. Same thing in eclipse. Home/end etc don't seem to do anything on a Mac when they move the cursor to the beginning of the line, end of lines etc elsewhere. There is probably a way to make them do something besides annoy people but it should do this out of the box. I still much prefer the windows version of office in terms of usability. It'll be interesting to see Office 2008 when it's out in January.

Buy Snap it pro
Snap it pro is a screen capture program that works with stills or makes movies of what you are doing. Very cool.

Fast sleep should be default
I hate having to wait for the safe sleep. I have it doing a fast sleep now using a pmset command but the default 10 second sleep is frustrating (I have 4GB of ram, writing it to disk takes a while).

iChat AV
Most frustrating piece of software due to firewalls and just plain getting anything but text to work. My mum bought an iMac and we can't get them to conference over video. It's a big selling feature but it just doesn't work well enough out of the box.

Summary
All this said, it's probably the best laptop I've owned and I'm pretty happy with it day to day. It's fast, more responsive than a windows laptop. I don't get disk thrashing like I did with windows. It's a lot faster than a vista based desktop in terms of feel when using it.

Liking Time Machine a lot in Leopard, most of the time

Time machine works well as far as I can tell. It backs up the deltas and makes them super easy to access from the file system, no more proprietary backup file formats, they just use the existing file system which makes it a lot more useful.

I've been using it now for a couple of weeks and it does work. It seems like everytime is consolidates hourly backups for previous days, it says it failed during that process but then the next backup comes along then it's working again. I figure this will get sorted when the Leopard update comes out in a couple of weeks so I'm not that concerned about it.

Overall, upgrading to Leopard has been uneventful, I don't see much in the way of improvements, the visual stuff isn't a real reason to upgrade. The main benefit I get is time machine which is probably one of the best personal backup utilities I've seen.

Time machine works again

Strange, on the off chance it would work again, I plugged in the external drive today and turned it back on and it's been doing backups all afternoon with no errors. No updates were applied that I know about so wierdness. Hopefully, this Leopard update thats coming in a week or two will fix the issues anyway.

Bluetooth and isight working now on Leopard

So
Of course, no sooner than I blogged they don't work, I figure out a way to get em working. I restarted the macbook and when the boot screen appears I did a APPLE-OPTION-P-R and then it made the boot noise again, rebooted and bluetooth and the isight work fine. The PR resets the cmos I think.
Anyway, they work now :)

Tiger looking more and more attractive

Well,
Leopard may go the way of Vista. My iSight camera doesn't work either. Apple geniuses say go back to Tiger. Just found a bunch of people with the same problem. Apple says its a hardware problem. Right. Suddenly when Leopard is installed, all the camera break...

A week after upgrading to Leopard

This audio podcast highlights the issues since upgrading to Leopard (Mac OSX 10.5) during the first week.

Download devwebsphere_2.mp3

Time machine only backs up when laptop is powered

Plugged in my external disk this morning and just checked a new next backup would be scheduled and nothing happened. "--" was the next backup. Restarted, same time. Plugged in the power to the macbook and presto, next backup time was set. So, time machine only backs up when the laptop is plugged in.

Leopard time machine initial backup done

The backup finally finished and it's been making hourly back ups since which so far haven't been noticeable using the macbook. The good news is that when the full backup finished, I could just eject the external drive with no worries. It continues when I plug it back in so thats easy.