And I felt like complete crap… I woke up around 9am, just a few minutes before the UPS guy came to drop off my dvd of “No Maps for These Territories”, which I am looking forward to watching with lunch… I’m feeling a bit better now, but for awhile there I was in rough shape…
Glad to see everyone else fell for the Olsen thing… I have to admit, at first glance I bought it, but as soon as I looked at the URL again I realized it was a hoax… For “credit where it’s due”, I was talking with The Arm who gave it to me in the first place.
I apparently have corrected the problem
I was having with my MacOS X install, so with that nuisance out of the way
for a few days I feel that I have finally had a chance to truly evaluate the
OS. So, without further ado, my review of MacOS X 10.2 (Jaguar).
Before I get started, I wanted to state for the records, that I still
think that Pre-OSX versions of Apple’s OS are complete abominations…
Perhaps their technical inadequacy was excusable back in 1984, but the fact
that it took them so long to rectify the issues are ridiculous. My opinion
on that hasn’t changed; OS9 is a complete piece of shit.
Some people question why, after years of slagging Macs, have I been
experimenting with the Mac. Well, the answer is pretty simple… I need an
alternative to Windows, and there are no other real options. The first
computer I owned was a C=64, and the first computer I bought was an Amiga
500. That trusty Amiga lasted me through high-school, but when it finally
breathed it’s last breath (or, more accurately, when I spilled my last glass
of Coke into it), Commodore had already been dead for awhile, and there
weren’t really any other viable platforms. I quasi-reluctantly bought a PC,
and became a Windows user… Windows was alright, but I never really
enjoyed using it.. I had some Unix experience from using bulletin boards
(most notable, Dan’s Domain, which provided a shell account on a Linux box
and gave me my first non-fido Usenet access). I played around with Linux on
my machine, but it was (heh, still is) simply too immature for the desktop
back in 1995. I retreated back to Windows, relatively content in using it
but never truly comfortable or happy.
BeOS saved me for quite awhile… From the release of R3 for x86 in 1998
until a year or so ago I was happily using Be as my primary OS.
Unfortunately, though, a hardware upgrade on my machine left the OS
unbootable and my desire to beat it back into operation had died along with
Be, Inc. I retreated back to Windows XP Pro, which is by far the least
sucky version of Windows to date. But I missed Unix, I missed the level of
comfort I had using Be, I missed feeling comfortable in my OS, and to be
totally honest, I missed feeling like I was flipping the bird at
Microsoft.
I gave Linux another chance, but I firmly believe that an OS should never
get in your way, and I should be able to slip into “novice” mode and never
have to compile kernels or insert modules or any such thing and just resort
to using my computer, simply. I like being able to be “Mr. Technical Guy”,
and I do so often, but I hate having to be that way. This is just
impossible on Linux, and it’s a huge turn-off. Add to this my opinion that
all of the UI choices on Linux suck, and I found my Linux partition growing
dust. When I had the opportunity to pick up a PowerMac on the cheap, I
jumped at the opportunity and here we are, two months later, talking about
my experience.
So what do I think of Jaguar after two months?
Interface
Jaguar’s UI is slick, but I definately have my complaints. While people
rave about the “lickability” of the OS, to me most of the time it is
annoying. I feel that I would prefer my UI to be fast as hell as opposed to
what I get in Jaguar. While window drawing isn’t terribly slow, it
certainly could be faster. I felt the need to upgrade the memory in the
machine to 768M from the 256M that came with it, and this definately helped
the performance. Jaguar is, and I don’t think this is news, an unrepenting
resource hog. I guess I am supposed to kowtow to the party line and say
that “Resources are Cheap and we have to use them”, but that’s bullshit. If
all this RAM usage was directly tied to usability, I would buy into it, but
it’s not.
I have also found that while there is a plethora of
freeware/shareware/homebrew applications to satisfy your every need, many of
them (and this is an obvious generalization) have completely amateurish or
overly fruity UIs. I was always under the impression that Mac users were
very UI-aware, so I really have trouble understanding why the UIs of so many
apps look like they were thrown together in 15 minutes by a monkey trained
in using Interface Builder. This problem is less-prevalent in commercial
software, but not completely absent.
I thought I would hate the Dock, but I really kinda like it. Between
“you and me”, I even have dock magnification turned on (sssshhh). I think
that the combination of “launching platform” and “view of what’s running”
works great, and I really like putting folder shortcuts and right-clicking
them to browse them, much like in Be’s Tracker (I just wish the Finder
followed suit).
I’m less satisfied with the Finder, but not completely disappointed.. I
feel that the Finder needs a bit more polish and work before it is truly
“done”, but it is definately functional. And for the record, I might even
like the Finder’s “column view” as much as my other favorite file-browsing
UI, Windows Explorer’s two-pane view. One of my biggest frustrations with
the Finder is that it never seems to remember my view settings.. I want to
force all windows to the Column View but it seems to pop out of column view
randomly). I also wish I could “cut/paste” files from the context menu.
Applications
I have ridiculously low needs for an OS to be usable to me:
Good Browser - I find myself using Chimera mostly, which works
pretty well. I wish Chimera would close tabs when I middle-click on them,
and I wish there was better pop-up blocking control (something exactly like
Phoenix would rule, it’s the best I have seen). Safari looks like it has
good potential, but until it gets tabbed browsing (which is apparently in
Safari CVS) and more fine-grained pop-up controls, I am not really going to
be using it much.. I find Safari’s bookmark management to be kind of annoying, as well. I use Chimera nightlies, so occasionally things get a
little wonky, and I sometimes turn to Safari when that happens.
Good Terminal - The OSX terminal does a pretty good job, the
occasional emulation glitch notwithstanding. I wish it would automatically
copy text to the clipboard that was selected (as opposed to right-clicking
and selecting “copy”). Other than that stuff, it definately does the
job.
Vim - I can’t survive without Vim, and fortunately both vim and
gVim work without complaint.
MP3 Player - Audion
does the trick, although I wish there was a complete analog to WinAmp2. That
has the perfect feature set for me. As I have discussed
before, iTunes’ catalogging and management stuff gets in my way, but I
use it to listen to my Car Talk subscription from Audible.
That’s pretty much it.. If I am writing software for the OS, a good set
of developer tools are also on that list. I haven’t played enough with
Jaguar’s Dev Tools much yet, so I haven’t formed an opinion yet.. My rough
view is that they don’t suck too much, but they aren’t Visual Studio.
The Hardware
Not much to say here: Apple has it together when it comes to industrial
design. I don’t get my shorts in a bunch over technical specs anymore, I
gave that up sometime in college. I just want a computer ballsy enough to
get done whatever tasks I set in front of it… So I am not going to talk
much about the horsepower of my PowerMac G4/733Mhz Tower. Instead, I am
going to quickly say that it has the most well-designed case I have ever
seen. I giggle like a little kid every time I pop open the case.. I
sometimes find myself opening it just for fun.
The suppository
mouse is still a piece of crap and is in the “Island of Misfit Hardware”
pile in the closet… I use my Logitech MouseMan Wheel Optical, which works
like a champ (as expected). I kinda like the “Pro Keyboard”, and I find
myself using it on the PC too (cuz I don’t want to have two different
keyboards on my desk).
In Conclusion
Jaguar doesn’t
suck too badly, and probably sucks less that Windows. I find myself
using it almost exclusively these days, although there are still a few
things I haven’t figured out how to do in OSX (Like extracting/processing
stuff from the Tivo). Whether this is a permanent trend has yet to be seen,
I may return to the PC at some point if Apple really pooches it, but for
now I will probably be using the Mac most of the time (unless I want to play
a game, which is a joke on the Mac). Hopefully it will continue to get
better, but only time will tell.
By the way, the other day I caught the premiere episode of Penn & Teller: Bullshit on Showtime. P&T rip apart various scams and hoaxes in this show, and the first episode focused on “psychics” like John Edward, etc. It’s a great show, and if you get Showtime I highly recommend you check it out (Especially if you like Penn and Teller)
I will probably watch the Super Bowl today, but I don’t even know what teams are playing this year (nor do I really give a crap), so it will mostly be commercial-watching.. Still, in the spirit I got some Kielbasa and Sauerkraut to have for dinner later and also got some pretzels and stuff to snack on. I was under the impression that some of my roommates would be here to watch along but apparently I was wrong.
Slept pretty late today, as expected given my late night last night. I woke up a few times this morning, not sure why, perhaps noises or perhaps dreams.. I was still exhausted and ended up sleeping until around 1:30p… I’ve been pretty productive so far today, though…
So I applied for my passport back on January 7th. When I applied I was informed that for an additional \$100 I could get expedited service of 2-3 weeks, otherwise it would take 4-7 weeks for the passport to arrive. I wasn’t in a rush, so I didn’t pay the extra fee. My sister Aimee told me today that it arrived (in New Jersey), a mere 2.5 weeks after I applied! I’m certainly glad I didn’t pay the expedition fee!
I sold my GBA on eBay today, I had put it up hoping to get rid of it before the Game Boy Advance SP is released in March. I think I asked a fair price, and someone executed the “Buy It Now” deal so I didn’t have to wait as long as I expected. :)
I reinstalled OSX last night in a last ditch effort to fix the problem that was causing me to hate using the Mac. I did another clean slate install, formatting the drive and starting from scratch (again), which is a total pain in the ass. So far, things seem to be going well, I haven’t seen that son-of-satan console message at all, but I am going to err on the side of caution and wait a few days before I feel satisfied. :)
Regardless, I shouldn’t need to reinstall the fucking operating system to fix a problem. I think I am going to return to my C=64, back when things ‘just worked’.
I forgot to mention that when Rory and I were grabbing lunch this morning the guy behind us actually ordered a “steak and cheese sub and a diet coke”… Like, who is he kidding with the diet coke???
Was ‘sposed to go out tonight and actually get out of the house, but it was cancelled… Her excuse ranked high on my bogosity meter, so perhaps something cooler came along..
I’m having trouble getting to quite a few places on the net, including CSH.. Not sure who’s fault it is.. The traceroute seems to make it all the way to RIT’s edge.. But there seems to be some kind of packet loss to sean-graham.com as well, so who knows…