more lame things

I don't feel in a particularly grumpy mood today, but I still have the urge to empty loads of criticism and complaints over my unsuspecting Mac, on which I type this post, on top of all. I have been mostly happy with it, but there are aspects that drive me nuts.

Take the mouse. As mighty as it is, it is already ill-conceived and further proof that at Apple, design brutally dominates over function. When I work on my computer, the screen is much larger than the space for the mouse to roam available on my desk. It happens frequently that the mouse bangs into the computer or assorted stuff scattered randomly on the desk before the pointer reaches its target. If one lets go of the mouse button, the pointer releases and the entire action will have to be repeated. Any other mouse I would just lift by its sides while keeping the button depressed. The mighty mouse doesn't have sides. It's one big button. There is nothing to hold on to. Well, almost nothing. I deactivated the fourth and fifth mouse keys, situated laterally on the body of the mouse. They now give my fingers traction and let me cover larger distances in limited space. That's not what Apple had in mind.

Another thing is the remote control. Nice to have a thought, really cool for presentations. However, Apple, having recently rebranded itself into a life-style company, supports only music, videos and photo slide shows, but not presentations. For that, one has to buy a third-party giffy. I might do that because presentations are a big part of my job, but I resent Apple for not offering the feature in its operating system.

That the laptop gets hotter than my Passat's engine used to when its head gaskets were blown doesn't bug me so much. After riding my bike to work through the London rain, at least I can dry my pants by putting the MacBook on my lap. It's not hot enough to burn through denim.

the big picture

Three weeks into its existence, this blog is clinically dead already. I'm not a fanatic in any way. A computer is a computer, and I can get along with anything that thinks in numbers. The Mac is a different kind of machine in many respects, but at its hearts, it's all zeros and ones.

I installed some crystallography software without much trouble but also without much passion. I'm not doing crystallography yet and haven't encountered the true challenges, either in the lab or on my desk. I can say that PyMOL is faster than ever. Making figures will be a snap.

What is going to keep me busy, on the other hand, is a humongous squat grey box with two silver buttons that's been occupying the better half of my desk for two days now. It's a Nikon Coolscan 9000 ED, the best film scanner there is. I used to shoot slides when I still owned my faithful 8008 SLR and loved the simplicity of the normal lens, the brightness of the viewfinder, and the air of superiority slides gave my photography. No more holiday snaps on negative film. Then came digital, and everyone started sharing memories. Mine were safely stored in three cardboard boxes.

This morning, some came out for the first time in four years. I slipped five slides onto the scanner's black tongue and stuck it into the opening at the front. After two-and-a-half hours, the scan was done, and I had five files on my hard drive. The images are brilliant, colorful, and extraordinarily clean, but the quality comes at a price. I'm not just talking about the scanner worth twice the MacBook Pro. No, each file weighs in at 24 megapixels and 136MB. More than one film won't fit on one DVD.

If I get the settings right, I should be able to dramatically cut down on the scanning times. Sixteen-fold sampling might just not be necessary. I had started out with only one slide, playing with the options, activating this and that and comparing the results. In the end, I decided for the all-out assault, to get the maximum I could because telling which scan was best was impossible on the PowerBook's LCD screen. Not only are LCDs notorious for their poor color reproduction, my screen is also LED backlit. While this technology is easy on the battery, it's much harder on the eyes. Lightness is far from uniform and colors seem to come and go. I couldn't even tell which black was the deepest.

Good thing there is no danger of the scanner moving anywhere in the near future. I have all the time in the world to feed it one handful of slides after another until all memories are ready to be shared. Maybe I'll even have a scientific break-through to report by the time all is done.

function follows form

Contrary to what they teach you in school, there are aspects of the Mac that suck. It might not be as bad as it was just a few years ago – and it's certainly much better than in the dark ages before X and Intel – but deep flaws and botches remain. The supremacy of design over engineering is the most notable.

Apple professes to live by the philosophy that simpler is better, or at least simple is good. Well, try changing the hard drive in the MacBook Pro and see if you agree with Apple's definition of simple. The drive sits in the corner of the machine. A little sliding door of the kind that any other laptop has would have allowed users to swap it easily. But there is no opening. The aluminum case wraps tightly around the innards of the computer. Thus, removing the hard disk requires loosening about three dozen screws in a process not unlike complete disassembly.

A second problem is also related to the slick edgeless case. One can only open the display screen to about 100 degrees. If the computer is placed on a low support such as a coffee table it's impossible to get a good viewing angle short of bending down like the Hunchback of Notre Dame or boldly placing an triple chocolate chip cookie or two underneath the front of the computer. Given how hot the laptop gets underneath the second rigging would quickly melt to gooey black disaster.

Function follows form even in peripherals. Take a look at the Mighty Mouse. (Read this review first – no, seriously.) Pretty, ey? Anyway, the mouse is indeed pretty sweet. Bluetooth connects it with any computer (so equipped, eg. my ThinkPad), the laser makes for accurate tracking, and the three buttons and the scroll wheel are all there. However and in contrast to my hands, the mouse is perfectly mirror symmetric. And while there are quite a few mice out there that aren't either, they don't have a double squeeze button to the left and right sides of the mouse's body and claim that's a functional addition. I have only one thumb on my hand and lack the dexterity to squeeze and click in the same position.

simple things

A friend told me yesterday that the root account in OSX is disabled by default. As I'm used to Linux, this seems very bizarre to me. Apparently, it's designed that way so as to not confuse the millions of Apple lemmings for whom a root is only something that might trip them on the race to the cliff where the next gadget is waiting. Anyway, this account can be activated. I don't know how yet, but I'll find out.

The same friend gave me company last night. We had what might not unreasonably be called a geek date, setting up and testing Bluetooth and Bonjour file sharing, hostile desktop take-over, video chat with iChat with our google accounts, and more. All worked flawlessly, once we had deconvoluted the half dozen networks flowing through the air simultaneously.

I was impressed with iChat, which was simple to use and very capable with the camera built into the frame of the screen, though screen sharing was furiously confusing and theater mode suffered from poor image quality. If you use certain distortive effects, you will inevitably make your counterpart burst out laughing. Great for making up after a fight.

Other things are, despite Apple's unrelenting marketing and the lemmings' fervent belief to the contrary, very far from simple. Try resizing windows. Assume your window is in the lower right corner of the screen and you want to extend it to the top left. What's the simplest way of doing this? Apple thinks moving the mouse to the title bar, clicking and moving the window to where you want its top left corner to be, releasing and moving the mouse to the bottom right corner, clicking again and resizing the window to where the bottom right corner was when the whole operation started. Fair enough?

Keyboard shortcuts are an ambiguous matter. They are designed to make you work more efficiently. I love Option-U to get umlauts. Then there are old standards like Apple-S to save, Apple-P to print, stuff like that. Works as long as things don't get too complicated. Under Windows, the only three-key combination in my repertoire is Alt-Ctrl-Delete to bring up the task manager. There are others like Context-W-F, which creates a new folder, something I would love to be able to do quickly but could never be bothered to remember. Apple takes it one step further. There are several four-key combinations like Shift-Command-Option-Esc to force quit the current application or Control-Option-Command-Eject to shut the system down promptly. I might even try to remember these two, but I'd argue all the while that their complexity is a bit excessive.

Lastly, and I present this as a good thing, I've found the combination that emulates the delete key. Press function and backspace simultaneously to get the desired result. Wouldn't having a dedicated key make this a bit simpler? I'm just glad they didn't emulate A by pressing fn B.

X's not Linux

After more than eight years with Linux, making sense of OSX is difficult. The system seems obscure. Many things are implemented differently, presumably to make things simpler. That's Apple's company policy, anyway.

In the Unix world, every system has a superuser called root. OSX has one also. So it says in /etc/passwd. However, the user is never prompted to give a root password. Is there not one? How do I log on as root?

I tried su - but couldn't get in. Then I created a superuser account called 'super'. I can now log on with su super but don't get very far. shell-init: error retrieving current directory: getcwd: cannot access parent directories: Permission denied is what is echoed upon logon. Who's denying the superuser permission? I try to change directories but nothing happens. Instead, another error message: chdir: error retrieving current directory: getcwd: cannot access parent directories: Permission denied.

Are things just not working, or has Apple reinvented the wheel? And why does the screen go dark after thirty seconds of inactivity? Try reading an article. It's unbelievable annoying, but I have no idea how to change that.

tap and scroll

To install Leopard, I have to click through a few screens answering questions such as "Which of your one hard drive do you want to install Leopard on?" I can then select the components I want to upgrade. Anyway, that's what another screen promises. I choose 'customize install' and am rewarded with ample selections, almost all of which are greyed out. Among them X11. It is selected by default and cannot be removed, and I am forced to upgrade to a buggy version of program which is running just fine at present. In the knowledge that I'm using a superior operating system, not only the best in this world but also in any other imaginable world, past present or future, I suffer silently and somewhat proudly.

When all is said, I send the install off by clicking OK. Oops, didn't work. I tap again. Still nothing. One of the first things I did when I started working with the Mac yesterday was activated tapping, clicking the touchpad with your fingers. I was excited when I found this feature available. The Mac doesn't like it and has already swallowed it. It might come back when all is done, but at the end of the day, the Mac's touchpad will remain brutally crippled, a faint shadow of what could be possible.

There is the issue with the lacking buttons, middle and right. Many lemmings devoutly belief that one mouse button is not only enough but simply more ergonomic and infinitely less confusing. Apple thinks so too. Curiously, when they invented the scroll mouse, they hid extra buttons underneath its smooth white skin. In my opinion, what resulted was the first usable mouse Apple had ever produced.

I need mouse buttons for fast work. Why cannot someone slip this extra functionality underneath the smooth silver skin of the elongated button of the MacBook's touchpad? I'm not asking for it to be marketed as the next revolution in personal computing. It doesn't have to be active by default. It shouldn't even be easily activatable lest the orthodox get confused. But if there could just be an unadvertised, well-camouflaged customization, a command-line jiffy allowing those who think different to degag their touchpad, I'd be eternally grateful.

The lemmings are happy with it as it is, even exuberant and happy to share their excitement. I was asked yesterday if I had already discovered two-finger scrolling. Two-finger scrolling, I was wondering? Why do I need to fingers to scroll? The Sony Vaio I bought almost nine years ago had one-finger scrolling, and so does the Thinkpad. Those who can't handle two mouse buttons readily use two fingers to scroll? I just don't get it.

As the install takes longer than even Fedora 7 the other day (Why exactly is verifying the integrity of the DVD mandatory?), I'm writing this post on my Thinkpad, immensely enjoying the luxury of a delete key and a right button on the touchpad. I scroll down and hit 'Publish Post'.

works out of the box

Fifteen minutes after the first power-up, the computer is humming away, and pleasantly quietly at that. Just like the Thinkpad, if I remember correctly. And just as XP needed to be upgraded to Service Pack 1 shortly after I received the IBM, the Mac comes with an upgrade-ready operating system. However, the upgrade is not a few days in the future, it has already happened, and the Leopard DVD is part of the package.

May I ask what kept Apple's army of cheap Chinese labor from installing the latest version of the operating system? The computer was ordered after the revision came out. Is this an indirect admission of the bugginess of the latest and greatest? Caveat emptor? Only upgrade if you really know what you're doing?

At this point, I restrict myself to a system update. Almost twenty packages are found whose installation proceeds speedily. In the end I have to reboot the computer. Apple tries very hard to make the transition from Windows to Mac as smooth as possible, it seems.

I have heard that, to ensure a satisfying user experience, one should not upgrade X11. I decide to play it safe and go with Tiger's X. Finding the optional packages on the installer CD takes me a while. I hope I'll eventually get used to Finder. I make sure to back up /etc/X11 and /usr/X11R6 to override Leopards files later.

Following at the heels of X (and the instructions on Bill Scott's website) come the Xcode developer tools, apparently a set of libraries, weighing in at a portly two and a half gig, without which X isn't even remotely useful, at least if you plan to do crystallography. What an ugly monster of a sentence that was. Sorry.

Gary Kerbaugh's pkgdiff script verifies that the installation of X11 is complete. No problem here. No problems at all? Well, I still haven't found the delete key.

Speaking about deleting, how do I uninstall applications? I don't need an Aperture demo version, and I don't want to test drive Microsoft Office. There is no reason for these programs to clutter up my hard drive. Do I just pull the icons into the trash? I have to ask someone more experienced.

Now, I'm off to see the Leopard, the wonderful Leopard of OS (X). Keep your fingers crossed.

first steps

I did this yesterday, but hadn't decided on the blog yet.

I unpack the computer and turn it on. The very same moment, all color seems to fade from my Thinkpad running next to it on the desk. The Mac's screen is a beauty, caressing my feeble eyes with brightness and intense colors. The IBM looks very pale indeed. In contrast, the Mac's keyboard doesn't feel right. It's metallicky in a weird way, and not all keys are where they're supposed to be. The enter key is small and far away. I kid you not when I say that my pinky is wider than the key. I don't have fat fingers, either. The tilde migrated three rows down, presumably to be less overlooked. There seems to be no delete key, or am I just overlooking it?

Before I can use the computer, I have to go through a few screenfuls of configuration with lovingly animated transitions. Welcome to Macworld. "In order to gain access, please give us your name, address, telephone number, date of birth, bank information, credit card numbers and your favorite color." Does Steve Jobs really need to know all this? Apparently, because if I refuse intimate details, the whole process stalls permanently. Wireless configuration is just like under Windows. The same goes for the Mighty Mouse.

Finally, the system is up and running. I install Firefox and a few essential extensions, namely Greasemonkey, Adblock Plus and Chipmark. Why can't I seem to get rid of the Chipmark toolbar folder? I remember having had prolonged difficulties with this on my Thinkpad, but I eventually overcame them. Don't remember how, though.

how it began

Yesterday, I received a MacBook Pro. Today, I'm sitting on my sofa trying to make it work as I see fit. Upgrading to Leopard, installing crystallography software, recreating the most of what I got used and warmly attached to in three and a half years of XP and eight years of Redhat/Fedora. From what it looks like so far, progress is steady.

I haven't don't anything outrageous or stupid yet, and before, inevitably, doing so, I want to document my steps so I can later retrace them. Maybe the blog will also serve as a guiding light for other Mac neophytes

As the title indicates, I'm doubtful about the Mac experience. While the operating system might provide the best basis for doing serious science, the abundance of smug lemmings and their wisdom stuck up in holy traditions and their pathetic follow-the-leader attitude won't ever win my heart over.