humandoing software

This came in immensely useful for me today, for reasons too long to discuss.

Two weeks ago, my wife and I returned from a vacation to Montreal. As fate would have it, the next morning (before I had a chance to make a clone, which I do on a nightly basis when I’m not on vacation), my hard drive up and died. System lockups. Half booting into OSX but not really. Brutal.

I’d been looking at the Seagate Momentus XT hybrid drives for a while (with particular interest since I read the review from Anandtech), and now that I needed a new drive (and needed it faster than AppleCare was going to get it to me) – I headed on down to NCIX and picked one of those suckers up.

For those interested in such things, I picked up the 500GB model (ST95005620AS) for about $150.00. It came with firmware SD22 installed.

I could never be bothered to perform detailed benchmarking on stuff – that’s what reading Anandtech is for. But here are my two observations so far:

1. This drive is FAST
2. This drive is LOUD

Boot time is cut to about 1/3 of my previous, after a few boots to get the SSD portion of the drive warmed up. Launching apps (Firefox, Safari, Adium, Aperture, Mail, 1Password, etc.) is ridiculously fast. Often less than a single bounce for Safari.

For reference, it’s worth noting that these observations are now being made while I’m using a 15″ MacBook Pro (Intel i7 / 2.66GHz, 4GB RAM) – when I first installed the drive it was in a 15″ MacBook Pro (Intel Core 2 Duo / 2.53GHz, 4GB RAM). I could say the same about the older MacBook Pro. Very fast.

As I also mentioned, it’s loud. It’s extremely obvious that there is a drive spun up in the machine, much louder than any previous drive I’ve had in any of my previous MacBook or MacBook Pro’s.

Overall reviews (generally speaking) for the drive are hugely mixed. I read reviews from Amazon, Newegg and NCIX. There are a lot of people happy with the drive, and a lot of people unhappy with the drive. Common complaints include corrupt files (not sure if some of these people had any clue as to what they were talking about, or might have simply got a bad drive, which happens sometimes. Deal with it.), but the largest complaint seems to be with drive spin-down. Several people note that their drive spins down on a regular basis (e.g. every 25 minutes), and then their machine will beachball as they wait for it to spin-up again. Seagate seems to have released a firmware update (SD23) that supposedly addresses this.

Several people have also complained that they can’t get the firmware update to work. I hadn’t noticed any spin-down problems, but just for kicks I thought I’d try to update the firmware. I downloaded the ISO, burned it to a disk, rebooted, let it boot into whatever forsaken version of DOS they use, and within about 30 seconds I had new firmware installed without so much as a hiccup. So that’s my experience.

I haven’t decided for certain if I’ll keep the drive (although I’ll take a 15% hit from NCIX for a restocking fee), simply because of how loud it is. I might opt for the tried and true ‘normal’ Seagate Momentus until they have some of the kinks worked out, but I still have about 5 days to decide.

Just a quick thought on the latest from Gruber regarding doing it first, vs. doing it right.

For a bit of context, he states:

Do you include the half-baked stuff, or hold it until it’s fully-baked? Apple wasn’t going to include a front-facing camera until they had software that made it useful in an iPhone-caliber way. HTC is happy to include a front-facing camera and leave its utility (and user experience) in the hands of third-party developers.

And from here – he carries on to state the following:

Android and iPhone fans will read the preceding paragraph very differently. Android fans will read it and say, “Exactly — give us the hardware and let developers figure out what to do with it.” iPhone fans will read it and say, “I can’t wait to get an iPhone 4.”

My first thought, reading the above paragraph wasn’t “I can’t wait to get an iPhone 4″, but rather “Thank you for saving me from having to deal with mediocre implementations of video calling that will no doubt increase my blood pressure and shorten my life. Thank you that I don’t have to give a flying crap what Qik or Fring are. I can’t wait to get an iPhone 4.”

This post has been sitting here as a Draft since September. Since I haven’t had the time to formulate my thoughts into family-friendly words, and since I can’t stand to see it sit here any longer, I’d like to summarize my findings ever so briefly.

Linksys WRT610N: Looks pretty. Admin interface is dated and aggravating. It had ongoing issues handing out IP addresses to my network attached printers, and after about 3 days, I wanted to smash it with a hammer (I returned it to Future Shop instead). Conclusion: FAIL.

D-Link DIR-825: Probably one of the most aggravating pieces of hardware I’ve ever had. Required constant reboots. The wireless range (especially of the 5GHz band) was so pitiful that it might as well not exist (or, optionally, you can cozy up to the router in the closet). That being said, even if you wanted to work right next to this thing in the closet – you’ll have to contend with the aggravating number of horrendously blue lights that could quite easily cause you to bleed out of your eyes. It was so aggravating, in fact, that I gave it away (I was too late to be able to return it). Conclusion: FAIL.

Apple Airport Extreme: This thing just works. I set it up once, and have since forgotten it even exists. It has never required a reboot, or any other babysitting since I bought it. Conclusion: WIN.

One thing that I love about Seth Godin is his unceasing efforts in trying to make companies see that they need to treat their customers with respect. This is made evident again in a great little piece he wrote about Apple’s $200 iPhone price drop that the mediawenttotown on.

He talks about a bunch of things Apple could have done to make the early adopters “ok” with the fact that they were just out $200. But then he goes on to say:

The key is to not give price protection to early buyers (that’s unsustainable as a business model) but to make them feel more exclusive, not less.

I wish more corporations would take the route of doing everything in their power to make their customers feel respected. To make their customers feel like they have a choice and could take their business elsewhere (even if they can’t take their business elsewhere).

I went out and picked up a new MacBook Pro yesterday, after the display issue on my wife’s iMac got so bad that finally the machine has become unusable. We’re gonna do a little swap – she’ll take my MacBook, I get the MBP, and the iMac is going to get thrown off a bridge or something.

What I wanted to comment about here is Apple’s Migration Assistant – which absolutely and undisputedly rocks my little world.

After pondering the long hours I was in for getting all my apps reinstalled, settings, passwords, serial numbers for apps, bla bla bla up and copied and running onto the new Mac – Nick pointed me to the Migration Assistant (which I’m not sure I even really knew about) and off I went. Plugged in my male-to-male FireWire cable into both machines, and booted the MacBook into Target Disk Mode (hold down ‘T’ while powering up until the FireWire symbol displays on the screen). The Migration Assistant asked me what users I wanted, if I wanted the Applications as well, and blammo. I went into the hot tub for a while, and when I got back I had my user, files, documents, library, settings, applications und alles.

So far there are only two apps that didn’t come over seamlessly, and those would be Parallels and Mozy (which, if you haven’t tried, is the best backup software I’ve ever laid my hands on), both of which I needed to reinstall, but after a bit of fiddling are working fine again. All told this thing saved me hours, and I’m sure I’ll use it again on my next Mac purchase.

I just wanted to blog about this because there are a ton of people having this problem and Apple is doing jack about it.

For examples, please see some photos on flickr (broken G5 iMac screens).

I purchased a G5 iMac (w/iSight, 1.9GHz, S/N W85422*, conveniently out of the range of those covered under the iMac G5 Repair Extension Program) on October 31, 2005. About one year and one week after the warranty expired it started to grow pretty vertical lines on the LCD. Today we’re up to 3 pink, 2 blue, 2 yellow and 1 grey line that stretch vertically top to bottom on the LCD panel. Each line is about 2 pixels wide, and each one is aggravating.

Oh, and by a ton of people, you can find about four million threads on the Apple Discussion Forums. This link alone contains a link to about 20 other topics with the same problem.

Apple: Do Something About It.