It was very interesting to observe during last few weeks - since WWDC announcement - the wave of expectations building up here in Canada. After all, we will finally officially have the iPhone and will be allowed to join the family of first-category nations, legally iPhonized, blessed by his Steveness himself. Selection of Rogers as carrier was no surprise. Rogers is only company that (IMHO) actually can run 3G iPhone - at least around here in Ontario / Quebec. You see, here in True North, we do not really have anything remotly resembling true competition in telecom space. Nor we have a reasonably good telecoms selling the phone service - only bad, really bad and terrible.
I still remember back in 2003/2004 when Rod Johnson wrote his books "J2EE Design and Development" and "J2EE programming without EJB" and presented his POJO based inversion of control framework - at that time, still packaged as com.interface21.* - that eventually evolved to Spring Framework.
Idea of composing J2EE application from basic Java Beans, that were instantiated by the core container that managed their lifetime and resolved references was for most people really an eye opening experience, true Aha! moment and completely new world discovery. Everybody I knew was happy and excited about it. I was also happy and excited - not as much because of the novelty, but because of seeing a great design ideas I saw before in closed source implementation to re-appear in open source world.
A comment got to me via friend mentioning why am I suddenly so negative about Apple and Macs, which quite surprised me. True, I have had some serious hardware issues in first two weeks of June, but this negative event was about as much positive experience as hard disk crash can be.
Thinking back what I have learned and discovered from this:
- Time Machine actually works
- it pays to plug in the firewire disk with Time Machine backups every day - the two second operation saves a lot of time in long run
- Carbon Copy Cloner is fantastic tool that makes creating bootable copy of your system disk as easy as possible
- I can easily use multiple bootable disks with various versions of OS-X, not only for backing up but also for trying out new things / installs - a kind of "VM on a disk"
So, after few days working diskless, I am back to normal operation mode. About time, we are late with last episode of screencast ...
The copying of external disk went error free and took almost 5 hours (210 GB). Fortunately, the MBP was usable - I did not want to modify too many files, but it was perfect for Web research and writing in Google Docs.
After reboot, the TimeMachine decided that 85 GB needs to be backed up again. This seems like bug in TimeMachine, because I have not really changed much more than few gigs - 4-5 max during the few days.
So, I have positive proof that the file system crash of last week was not a software problem in Leopard, but indeed caused by hardware failure. After restoring system from Time Machine, things looked pretty good - everything seemed to work. I was able to re-render the screencasts I have lost - I mean I have lost converted AVI files and MP4 files, not the "source" MOV files. I worked on Mac over Saturday and Sunday. Because my Time machine does not backup virtual machine images, I had even whopping 65 GB of free space :-). I saw a bit more of beachballs, but I thought (wishful thinking) it is because Spotlight is busy rebuilding index ...
It happened on Wednesday afternoon. I knew something is wrong with my MacBook Pro immediately - when I saw semi-dark screen, unresponsive machine - even mouse cursor was frozen - and heard fans blowing full speed, making the strange, clicking noise coming from inside almost disappear ...
OS-X does not freeze too often, but it can happen and as a matter of fact, I have seen it happen before during my almost two years with Mac, so I did not panic. As expected, the Alt-Option trick did not work, so all I could do was to force power off.
I have got a letter from Online Rights Canada. I believe that what is about to hapen, may have pretty deep implications down the stream. Minimum thing I can do is try to help spreading the word.
Here is the message:
Dear Online Rights Canada Supporter,
We understand that the government will imminently introduce legislation to amend the Copyright Act - and it intends to push it through quickly. We at Online Rights Canada wanted to let you know what was ahead in the next few weeks, and what you can do to protect Canada from a new DMCA.
I had this discussion with a friend where we both found out that there is surprising amount of very useful little apps and tools in Mac's software world that people use on daily basis and which are worth of spreading word about. Here is first of the programs I did not know about few months ago - and today I barely can imagine working without them.
VisualHUB is simple but very powerful video convertor for Mac. It is simple in the user interface:
I've been writing a lot of code for the past 6 months. I have to admit, it is a welcome change from Word documents and PowerPoint presentations. Java, unlike text and graphics has a clearer definition of correct and finished.
From Software Is A Craft by Dan Pritchett