MacNoob

This guy busts Ted Kennedy is his rather large chops. If you ever wonder why most of us hard-working Americans work well into May to pay our taxes…

I don’t know how you did this year, but my family paid around 27% income tax. Ted Kennedy and his ultra-rich “limousine liberal” buddies are very generous with my tax dollars, NOT THEIR OWN!

I just installed a Silicon Image Sil3132 SATALink express card controller and attached a LaCie 400GB external eSATA drive. I can’t believe how rippin’ fast this thing is. I did a complete SuperDuper backup using the new configuration and the whole thing (90+ Gigs) only took ten minutes! The data rate SuperDuper reported was 358MB per second!! Thats right PER SECOND! Not megabits, megaBYTES! I’ve never witnessed anything so fast on a home setup. I have a 4 TB SAN at work that doesn’t transfer data at these rates. The sweet part about this is how inexpensive it is. The external eSATA drive I’m using was only $35 more than the standard USB model of the same size. I’ve done a little investigating and all the major PC manufacturers offer models with eSATA ports and PCIx cards are typically less than $50 for two port setups that are capable of RAID1 and RAID0. The only drawback is the eSATA cable. All the ones I’ve seen are relatively short (the longest I’ve found is 1 m) and not very pliable. A small concession. I’ll never buy a plain USB or firewire external hard disk again!

I hate the “switcher” label. It implies that someone using a Mac for the first time has abandoned all other platforms entirely. I do love my Macbook Pro, but I still have four other Windows machines in my home, two of them running Vista Ultimate, and I really like them also. I think it has become fashionable to dump on Vista. Quite frankly, I’m getting a bit bored by all of it. The “main” PC in the MacNoob household is a Dell Core2 Duo and Vista works just as well on it as OS X does on my Macbook Pro. In fact, there are many aspects of Windows I find superior to OS X. Not to say OS X isn’t a fine platform, it is, its just that Windows has its’ strengths and OS X does too. What are they, you ask? First, Windows is upgradeable. If I want a bigger hard drive, I just install it. If I want a new video card, same story. If I want to add more firewire or eSATA ports, I just slip the new card in and bingo! With these pluses come the minuses. Drivers can sometimes be an issue. This is where I think Vista got its bad rap. The hardware manufacturers were woefully tardy delivering Vista drivers. Subsequently, lots of people wound up with printers that wouldn’t print, video cards that wouldn’t display properly and a host of other gizmos that worked fine with XP but gave Vista headaches. The same people who trash Vista now must have forgotten what a pain XP was when it first released. Now that Vista has been out for a while, PC makers have caught up nicely and things just work right out of the box. My Dell typically runs for weeks without error or need to otherwise restart. The key to the Mac’s stability is the absolute authoritarian nature of Apple. OS X only runs on Apple hardware, period. Most people don’t know or care to know what an infinitely smaller problem set that is for an operating system manufacturer to code for. For all you Mac fanboys out there, flexibility and stability are trade-offs! Given the virtual cornucopia of hardware combinations Vista runs on, its a miracle the OS will boot at all! Apple has done a marvelous job creating a sleek and sexy lineup of machines that run very well. To be an Apple user, however, YOU MUST COMPLY!
I bought my Macbook Pro the day Leopard was released but it came with Tiger pre-installed. I ran Tiger only briefly (about two weeks) until my Leopard disk arrived. Guess what, when I upgraded to Leopard my DAW software and firewire mixer quit working altogether. It took Alesis, the firewire mixer manufacturer, almost three months to get the first beta driver published. Steinbergh, the DAW publisher, didn’t have a working version of Cubase for leopard until late February. I heard a few complaints about OS X in the first months, but they paled in comparison to the outright lynch-mob mentality prevalent in Vista editorials.
My Mac is a ton of fun to work with. It does what it does very well. Core animation and core audio are, in my opinion, better technologies than their Win32 counterparts. So, when I need to create and/or edit audio or video my Mac is my choice. For most other tasks I default to my Windows machines. It may be because I haven’t figured out how to do some of those tasks on my Mac yet. Time will tell.

Well, it’s conclusive, the problem with my network attached storage issue is a problem with Leopard.  Linksys (i.e. Cisco) has done what I consider their due diligence.  They were able to fully reproduce my problem in their lab when using a Leopard machine, but when they used Tiger, everything worked fine.  The engineer I spoke with said they have been working on the problem since I reported it and couldn’t fix it.  What was really intriguing is the level of effort they put into the issue.  This Cisco engineer told me they had poured over the source code for the WRT600N firmware and found it to be 100% compliant with Apple’s Leopard API.  Even if they wanted to fix the problem, they wouldn’t know where to start.  I’ve been in their shoes before.  When coding to someone’s API you have to go on faith that the API does what it says.  If it doesn’t, you can’t fix a problem even if you know where it is.  Kudos to Cisco for giving it their best shot.  Even though my problem still exists, I will buy Linksys (Cisco) products in the future simply because of this experience.  I have never been involved with a support incident that garnered so much attention from the provider.  As for Apple?…Give me a hand. I called Apple’s tech support, and they weren’t much help but did agree to document my problem. I figure the more folks complain about this, the more likely it is to be addressed. Give Apple support a call at 1-800-APL-CARE (1-800-275-2273) if you’ve experienced network problems with Leopard.

Thanks,

MacNoob

More to come.

I’ve recently become hooked on the new HBO film-series “John Adams” based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by David McCullough.  Tom Hanks produced this series and the cinematography is magnificent!

Filmed largely in Colonial Williamsburgh (the American scenes, anyway), this work completely transports me to that time in our young nation’s history.  As I understand it, Mr. McCullough’s book is based on the extensive correspondence between John (Paul Giamatti) and Abigail (Laura Linney) Adams.  I had heard about this book a while back, but it never made my all-to-short reading list.  This series has moved it right to the top.  I highly recommend this HBO series to anyone, but especially school-age children.  Given our public education system’s apparent total incompetency with regards to American history (56% of eighth-graders can’t point to Washington D.C. on a map!), this film provides insight into the birth of our nation even a history buff like myself will find enlightening.  More importantly, the facts are presented in real human terms that are both intriguing and entertaining.

As I view the actions of our country’s founders as depicted by “John Adams” I can’t help but feel quite meloncholy when today’s reality snaps back into focus.  Are men of John Adams’ character extinct?  How lucky we are as a nation to have had men like Adams, Franklin, Jefferson and Washington at the exact point in history when America needed them most.  It sounds like providence to me.

It looks like I was overly optimistic about Linksys’s determination to fix the permissions problem with the WRT600N.  Instead, they pointed the finger at Apple.  Apparently the problem I have is reproducible in Leopard, but works fine in Tiger.  Their conclusion, whether I believe it or not, is that the problem must be with the Leopard operating system.  That is certainly a defendable position, although not the one I’d hoped for.  I’ve posted my problem on Apple’s support forum so maybe someone will discover a fix.  One small consolation, Cisco is leaving the incident listed as “Open” for whatever that’s worth.