Mokka mit Schlag » Mac

Recently my PowerMac G5 tower running Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger began ejecting all DVD discs. It will accept CDs, but it immediately ejects every DVD I insert: blank or preformatted, video or computer. Booting up off an older operating system on a different partition didn’t change this. It feels like a hardware problem, though I’m not 100% sure of that yet. Any suggestions? (For obvious reasons, running tools that are themselves provided on DVD is not an option.)

Update

It does indeed seem to be a hardware problem. I went down to the Apple Store at Fashion Island and picked up a Lacie external DVD burner, which, so far, seems to be working fine. Reinstalling the operating system and all data, by contrast, had no effect on the internal drive. One of these days I should probably just swap out the internal drive, but right now I can’t really be bothered, especially since the recent move and frequent travel have inspired me to switch to my Macbook as my primary machine.

So I have an article due about Java 7 two days ago, and I discover that my Linux box has a bad Ethernet card (or port, or some such). I don’t have time to run out and buy a new one; but fortunately I have just purchased a new Intel MacBook so I grab a demo copy of VMWare Fusion and an Ubuntu 7.1 Gutsy Gibbon Image and install that. However, I don’t have the MacBook setup with all my files yet so editing, the keyboard is a little wonky, and the screen is small. I don’t really want to type on that system just yet. So instead I turn on terminal sharing in Ubuntu running in the VM and log in over the wireless network from my main desktop PowerMac using Chicken of the VNC. I’m now running Java 7 on my PowerMac G5 over the network! Shockingly this all works.

Unfortunately there’s a at least a two-second delay between when I type a character on my end and when it shows up on my screen. So install sshd on Ubuntu using Synaptic (all over the network from Chicken of the VNC). I do a quick “ifconfig -a” in an Ubuntu terminal to determine my IP address, and then login from the Mac terminal. Now I can do xtermish things from my regular monitor and keyboard, and performance is acceptable.

What a brave new world we live in. :-)

I just ordered one of Apple’s new MacBooks. They just released them so this seemed like the best time to buy. There won’t be any new notebooks released until MacWorld in January, and if anything is released then it’s likely to be a MacBook Pro rather than a MacBook. I don’t use my laptop as a primary machine, just for traveling, so weight is more important to me than screen size. Thus I prefer the 13″ MacBook to the 15″ and 17″ MacBook Pros.

The Pros do have a faster graphics card, but it’s not like I’m going to be playing WarCraft on my laptop. The Pros do have an option to have a matte screen instead of a glossy one. The MacBook is glossy only. Generally, I prefer the matte screen; but that they just be what I’m accustomed to. Hopefully, after a week or two, the glossy screen will look normal to me. To clinch this one, the MacBooks have a smaller native resolution (that is, a larger pixel size) and I prefer not to squint.

A few years ago the iBooks were crippled relative to the PowerBooks–for instance they could only mirror the desktop to a second monitor, not expand the desktop across two displays–but these days the main difference seems to be screen size. The newest MacBooks use the same basic chipset as the Pros and the CPU’s only about 10% slower. All but the base model even have a dual layer SuperDrive. Possibly the speakers are a little weaker in the MacBook. The low-volume speakers have been my biggest disappointment with my old TiBook; but even if they are, the smaller size is still more important to me.

I was tempted to wait for the hypothetical, solid state, ultraportable MacBook, but I don’t really know if any such project exists, or when it will come out if it does.
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Apple’s announced that Max OS X 10.5 Leopard is one sale next Friday, October 26. Amazon seems to have the cheapest price: $109 with free supersaver shipping. However, if you order it direct from Apple for $129, it should arrive on Friday. I’m cheap so I’ll probably just wait for it to arrive a few days later from Amazon. I notice items shipped with Super Saver shipping usually arrive faster than the extra 5-9 days they say it will take. I suspect they’re mostly using the Super Saver as a way to distinguish their most price-sensitive customers.

Although I am looking forward to Leopard (especially Spaces, Time Machine, and the new Address Book and iCal) I may even wait till I buy my next Mac to upgrade. Apple may be releasing new MacBooks or desktops in the next few weeks as well, and if they do I may well buy one. If so, there’s no big reason to pay $109 for an OS upgrade for a machine I’m replacing soon anyway.

I do wish Apple would include the new version of iPhoto with the OS. GarageBand, iDVD, and iMovie I can live without, but iPhoto’s pretty important to me, and my version’s getting a bit old in the tooth. I’m not sure where I got it: with one system or OS upgrade or another. I can’t keep track of what’s bundled with what these days, and it’s always a pain when you have to wipe a disk clean or transfer files to a new computer and then discover some of what you thought were bundled apps are now missing. Then again I may be outgrowing iPhoto. It may be time to look into Aperture or Adobe Lightroom instead.

I do most of my presentation slides in pure XML, but I also do a few more high-level/less-code talks in PowerPoint. Sometimes I need to give the same presentation to different audiences or at different lengths. In XML it’s easy to “comment out” individual slides or whole sections to reduce a presentation to size. Is there any plausible way to do this in PowerPoint?
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My search for a reliable, fast, correct, usable program to synchronize my G5 with my TiBook over Ethernet continues. It had been almost a year since I last evaluated and rejected Decimus Synk, but it had been through several minor versions since then. I figured it was time to give it another try, and see if Decimus had fixed the bug syncing large (> 2.1 GB) files that had led me to reject it last year.

I synced up the TiBook before I left for Norway and all went well, after I finally excluded enough data to allow the desktop content to fit on the laptop. However when I came home and ran the sync in the other direction, Synk hung on my Thunderbird Inbox. Seems I hadn’t cleaned it out enough in Norway and it had grown from just about 2.0GB to 2.4GB in the week I was away. Apparently that was enough to break Synk.

When are programmers going to learn that a signed four-byte int (or even an unsigned four-byte int) just isn’t big enough to hold a file size any more? It hasn’t been large enough for years. Heck, I’m not sure even a long would be large enough for some applications. It’s not just e-mail Inboxes that are big but any sort of data recorded from the outside world: sound, video, scientific imagery, DVD images, backup sets and more. Large files are proliferating. We’ve got to stop ignoring them.
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