Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat

This is part of an ongoing series of longer articles I will be posting every Sunday as part of an experiment in offering more in-depth content.

Although many discussions in the storage industry focus on the relative merits of one protocol or another, the conversation occasionally turns to the core issue at hand: We continue to patch together a system based on outdated concepts. Most storage protocols continue to mimic direct attached storage, and most of our so-called networks act as point to point channels. An ultra-modern virtualized storage infrastructure with all the latest bells and whistles still holds the concepts of block and file at its core. Whenever the storage industry has tried to bring about real storage management they have been stymied by a lack of context for data.

No amount of virtualization, and no new protocol, will fix this. Put simply, we need a storage revolution. Continue Reading »

Wow! Apple is recalling and replacing all of the compact power adapters shipped with every iPhone 3G sold to date in many countries! According to Apple’s support release, the prongs can break off and become lodged in an outlet, posing a risk of electric shock. And of course, inconveniencing the person who wants to keep their iPhone charged! American-style two-blade adapters in the United States, Mexico, Canada, Japan, and several Latin American countries are affected.

Looks like Apple is trying to make good on their defective power designs. Let’s hope they learn from this and the MagSafe debacle and make better-quality devices in the future!

As impressed as I am with Apple’s iPhone App Store, with its simple purchasing and automated installs and upgrades, it would be better if the thing actually worked reliably. Along with sometimes forgetting song purchases, there seems to be some gremlin that causes the App Store to forget that certain apps are installed and not check for updates. This left me scratching my head, as updated apps like Super Monkey Ball, Facebook, Evernote, and Cube Runner remained in their previous state.

I suspect that the App Store did not update its internal record of my purchases when I wiped and re-set up my iPhone shortly after upgrading to OS 2.0. When I did this, I reinstalled all the apps from iTunes’ backup copy rather than re-downloading them from the App Store, and perhaps this caused them to be overlooked.

Continue Reading »

Chicago O'Hare Airport like you've never seen it before!

This time, instead of turning green, my iPhone snapped this oddly discombobulated photo. The very next shot was perfect, but how can one explain this? Whatever the cause, it’s certainly interesting!

Seriously, folks, this is the exact image from my iPhone, no editing involved! And it did this again this afternoon!

Yup, my Boot Camp drive icon is customized, too!

In my last post, I discussed the simple but confusing steps required to add custom icons to Mac OS X drives. I mentioned that there were some tricks to getting custom icons on some drives, however, including Boot Camp and NTFS disks. This week, I’ll show how to customize these as well.

There are two core problems with customizing drive icons for certain volumes:

1. OS X can’t directly write to anything but HFS+ and FAT, and this includes writing icons
2. OS X needs a special resource on the drive to indicate that the custom icon should be used, and only HFS+ supports this

But it’s easy enough to get around these limitations. Apple takes care of number 2, and we can cover number 1 in one of two ways.

Continue Reading »

You've got voicemail!

This is part of an ongoing series of longer articles I will be posting every Sunday as part of an experiment in offering more in-depth content.

I have long felt that voicemail was archaic.  Like fax machines, voice mail systems seem stuck in an earlier era, with arcane controls and so little feedback that the user has no idea if their attempt at communication has been successful.  In fact, I was long loath to trust voice mail systems at all, instead just asking people to call my other numbers or email me.

With this in mind, I was impressed by Apple’s reinvention of voice mail with the iPhone.  Although the Visual Voicemail feature is widely recognized as referring to the interactive table of voice messages shown in the phone, their implementation goes well beyond that, offering all I wanted in a voice mail system.  Indeed, although I was considering other systems prior to getting the iPhone, I have since settled on Apple’s simple but effective system.

Continue Reading »

This makes it much easier to see which drive is which!

I previously wrote about the benefits of custom drive icons, which can help you to keep your removable and internal drives straight, and how to create them on Windows Vista. Well, Mac OS X surprised me by using the same generic icon for every drive, so I set about figuring out how to customize them here, too.

It turns out it’s not only simple to do, but illustrates an odd way in which Apple implemented their split resource/data fork filesystem idea in a GUI. This exercise taught me a lot - what an ICNS file is, how Apple stores drive icons, what a droplet is, and how to use GIMP on a Mac.

This is part 1 - where I’ll go over the basics. Part 2 covers custom Boot Camp drive icons and other troubles.

Continue Reading »

Apple has finally fessed up to the terrifying failure (read smoke, sparks, fire) of their beautiful but fragile MagSafe power connectors. The combination of a slim, flexible cable, tiny but firm-gripping magnetic connector, and inadequate strain-relief causes the wires inside to burst their sheaths, short out, and burn. I suspect that Apple’s built-in winding “ears” have caused folks to wind the cables too tightly when traveling with their adapters as well.

Although mine remains pristine, I’ve been wary of the delicate connector since day 1. Making matters worse, Apple has patented the MagSafe connection, so no third-party alternatives are available.

Up until yesterday, Apple refused to admit that their design caused these failures, and folks report mixed success in securing replacements (under warranty) when they have failed. Purchasing a new power supply from Apple is an $80 proposition, but many have been forced to do just that.

However, as of yesterday, Apple officially announced that they will evaluate and replace defective power supplies whether under warranty or not. All one has to do is bring the unit (not the computer) in to an Apple store’s Genius Bar. I imagine they will be replacing quite a few of these in the next month or so, and supplies might become scarce.

What I’d really like to see is a redesign of the thing to make it less prone to failure. The MacBook Air’s connector is angled so the cord runs alongside the machine instead of sticking out, a positive move in my eyes. But the Air uses a low-wattage supply so one cannot use it with a MacBook, let alone a MacBook Pro.

It’s not like I’ve used it (at all), but I’m getting a kick out of MobileMe anyway. See, Apple has extended my trial of .Mac repeatedly, and now I’ve got service through November, and it’s all free! Seriously, this is getting pretty funny!

I do expect that Apple will get the bugs worked out and that MobileMe will become a useful tool, maybe even by November. But I still don’t see the compelling value in the service that makes it worth $99 (or $76.99) when Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft offer similar services for free.

I suppose it would be nice to have a “single sync” cloud service, but it doesn’t work all that well at this point. Maybe I’ll pay when they get it right. Or maybe I’ll just keep getting free extensions forever!

I recently mentioned how impressed I was with the speed of my MacBook, even when running Windows in Boot Camp. Of course, this was a subjective feeling, so I decided to try timing some events to see if the clock agreed with my brain. Sure enough, the Mac is faster than my Dell XPS M1330 by a good margin. But I was surprised to learn that Vista, even in Ultimate guise, wasn’t half bad, either. The root of my performance gripes seems to be what happens after Vista is booted - after the desktop appears, all OSes spend time doing something in the background, but Vista spends much more time.

My test was simple: I used the iPhone’s stopwatch to time the following key events after startup:

1. The Mac Gong or disappearance of the PC or VMware BIOS screen
2. The appearance of the login box (I paused the timer at this point to give me time to enter my password)
3. The appearance of the desktop
4. I then clicked on the icons to launch my mail and web browser apps, assuming this would be the first thing most people would do on startup, and timed how long it took for each to load and present content
5. Finally, I stopped the clock when the system appeared usable - hourglasses disappeared, the disk stopped chugging like crazy, and all background apps had loaded and were running
6. I also timed how long it took for the system to power down after ordering a shutdown

Not surprisingly, the MacBook with OS X was fastest, though it took a surprisingly longish time to get Mail and Safari launched compared to Firefox and Outlook in Windows. OS X also excels at knocking off the backup tasks and giving a stable, ready-to-use system.

Booting Windows Vista Ultimate in Boot Camp was surprisingly speedy, too, and this was the core of my test. The Mac gave me a working Windows environment in just 2:15, compared to 1:40 for OS X and 3:10 for my Dell XPS M1330. I’m not sure exactly what the Dell is doing, but it churns and chugs for quite a while on bootup, even after I stopped the clock, and it’s got a nice clean install with few apps running.

Finally, I timed my Boot Camp volume in VMware Fusion (1.1.3) and found that, although it was speedy enough when it was running, it took 30 seconds longer to get started than booting natively. But even Fusion was quicker than the Dell.

My feeling is that Microsoft has spent some time optimizing the startup experience in Vista, trimming the time it takes to get a login window and desktop by shifting some work to background tasks that interfere with usability once the system appears to be running. A clever trick, that, but one that frustrates me on a daily basis as I stare at a desktop full of icons that I can’t use quite yet.

Once again, this is not the most scientific test ever, but it helps to show what I feel about the Mac:

• It’s quicker when I want to sit down and start working
• Windows is much quicker on the Mac than the Dell, despite only slightly better specs (2.2/4 GB vs. 2.0/2 GB)

I ran each test a few times, and although they varied by a few seconds they were fairly consistent.