As you know I have been happily beating against my OSX clone and so far it has been very interesting. I do not have more than 1024 since I can not change the refresh rate on the ATI card and I dont have sound but thats ok, neither are fatal errors. I did make a change where I added a new Intel 10/100 NIC with an onboard processor (server card) and re-ran the benchmarks. The CPU picked up a few points, the floating point picked about 20 points. The memory test picked up 12 points with “fill” going from 69 to 131 points !! All the memory functions across the board picked a bit here and there. Even the disk IO picked up a few points of improvement. The disk throughput still sucks being a very slow IDE unit but it’s interesting just how much of a difference giving the NIC it’s own IO processor can make even on an older system. I plan to rerun some network benchmarks to see the differences on network throughput next.

I got my DVD/CD burner working and it appears to work just as well as the iMacG5. No coaster up to now and it doesnt bog the system like in Windows. This brings up a point, on this box, it was my beater with Windows XP for three years and I know it’s performance well. I can honestly say that OSX is faster across the board and “snappier” in usage than with XP. The boot up is amazing, under two minutes start to finish. XP took five minutes on a good day.

I keep thinking where can I get the cash for a new Mac now that I have been able to test and play with the Intel version. This test may get expensive

Ever since I installed Adobe Acrobat, it’s been a real pain because Adobe wants to open the full package every time I want to just VIEW a PDF. I found a cool tool called RCDefaultApp which is a preference pane that allows one to very easily redo or improve associations with applications, file names etc. I was able to fix my Adobe problem in less then 10 seconds, no mess no fuss. And it’s FREE!!

I’ve spent the last couple of days installing and testing various pieces of software on my Intel/OSX Dell. I have to say the more I use it, the more impressed I am with the Intel version of OSX. If Apple would ever sell OSX as a OS to use on your own Intel, they would make killing. This is sweet stuff. My Dell is about 3-4 years old and certainly not state of the art but using XBench to run a set of benchmarks, it shows some impressive numbers for being “old” hardware. Take a look at these numbers which compares my 2.8Ghz P4 Dellvs. a G5 2.0 Ghz PowerMac:

• CPU = 60.47 Dell vs. 100.00 for G5
• Floating Point Basic = 1.46 Gflop/sec Dell vs. 2.38Gflop/sec G5
  
• Floating Point Library = 11.61 Mops/sec Dell vs. 17.41 Mops/sec G5
• Computation = 1.89Mops/sec/4 threads Dell vs. 2.03 mops/sec/4 threads G5
• Memory Allocate = 250.90 Kalloc/sec Dell vs. 367.23 Kalloc/sec G5
• Fill = 3399.64 Mb/sec Dell vs. 4862.23 Mb/sec G5
• Copy = 1685.60 Mb/sec Dell vs. 1571.73 Mb/sec G5
• Uncached Write = 25.34 Mb/sec 4K blocks Dell vs. 61.40 Mb/sec 4K blocks G5
• Uncached Read = 27.45 Mb/sec Dell 4K blocks vs. 29.27 Mb/sec 4 blocks G5
• Random Uncached Write = 28.87 Mb/sec 256K blocks Dell vs. 32.01 Mb/sec 256K blocks G5

As you can see, the creaky Dell is not too far off from the PowerMac G5. A newer motherboard with fast memory, faster processor and a serial disk drive, the numbers would be alot different to the Dell’s advantage. This shows the wisdom of Apple’s choice in moving to Intel vs. the PowerPC chip. Even old chips can rip pretty well on OSX and a simple ungrade of a faster drive would really breath some speed into the old bones.

I installed iDVD, iPhoto and iMovie to see how the native intel binaries would work. And they are speedy. They open noticable faster then my iMac G5 and just the general overall feel is snappier. Carbon copy cloner worked even though it was working using Rosetta. I’ve tried two different shells and SSH clients all of which worked fine.

I gotta get me a new system with new hardware and run the benchmarks. From what I’ve seen so far, Microsoft had better be afraid, very afraid of what OSX is bringing to the world of Intel. Even more so when you can boot to Windows, run a app and then dual boot to OSX on the exact same hardware and run the same app for back to back comparisions. I think there will be many surprised people who will be asking “why do I want to run Windows?”

I have finally gotten to play with OSX running on Intel. Not exactly the way Apple would prefer it but I was able to recycle my Dell workstation into OSX today. I removed my hard drive which has Windows and which I do need to put back when I’m done and installed an old 60 gig unit for the testing. The CPU is a 2.4 Ghz P4 with 512meg of ram and two DVD drives. It has the normal USB and firewire ports with an ATI 128Meg card. The system is a Dell 4600 which was the high end when I got it but now it’s pretty dated. I also aquired a patched version of Intel OSX 10.4.3 (find it yourselves) and made myself a bootable DVD.

Holding my my breath I booted, made two partitions on the drive and installed OSX. Damned if it did not work right away, no mess, no fuss. It does not know about sound card and the video is strictly VGA at 1024 but it works I’ve been happily installing various bits of software, some native Intel and some not and for the most part, everything works. I did find that part of “Net Tool Box” crashed (trying to capture traffic) and I suspect that anything like a sniffer would fail but I am planning on testing this thought. But apps like Abiwrite, RDCmenu, Camino, Fugu all work fine. Right now I am downloading the XCode Tools to see how they behave under the Intel chip since I have them on my G5.

Just for FYI.. I did boot the DVD on a Dell 2850 dual Xeon server. The installer came up but did not see the RAID (duh) but the mind boggled at running OSX on a dual 3.4Ghz Xeon platform. I wonder if would actually work?

The interesting item on the Dell is that the CPU shows up as TWO CPUs (hyperthreading). I plan to turn off Hyperthreading and see if that helps or hinders the performance.

Now, one question is why resort to this patched and pretty grey area of working with OSX Intel. Well, I own three Macs, I have a Mini which I bought used, a refurb’ed iBook (G4) and a used iMac G5. The common thread is all of it’s used and bought with limited funds. Even though I have a developers membership which entitles me to a discount on hardware, I can not afford to buy a new Macbook Pro or iMac. But I need to touch and play with the Intel version for development and to see how my current set of tools works (or not). There has to be a better way for people to be able to develop and test with OSX on Intel than having to buy all new hardware. Thats fine if you have the pockets but I dont and I’m not alone. This is one area that Linux just shines, I can get my favorite distro and plunk it down on my existing hardware, even if I bought the distro which I do own (Xandros), I can recycle virtually any system I want to.

When OSX ran on the PowerPC chip, it was a given that you had to have Apple hardware and we grumbled but accepted it. Now, with the advent of Intel in the Apple world, Apple needs to loosen the reins a bit and give back to the community. Even if it were a discounted and unsupported version of OSX for dev, it would be a help. If Apple said tomorrow that there would be a version of Intel OSX for 75$ and it is unsupported (dont call us if your ABC video card does not work etc), I would be down to the store in a heartbeat. I can afford 75 bucks and a few hours of my time to see if I can recycle one of my older Windows boxen. I can not afford to gamble on a 2,000 dollar notebook or a 1400 dollar desktop system. So for 75 bucks I would be legal, Apple would have another user in the corral and everyone is mostly happy. Listen up Apple!! In the world of Windows, I subscribe to the “Action Pack” which gives me OS and applications from Microsoft to my dev work on and it’s pretty cheap. I’m legal, MS has some bucks from me and everyone is happy. It’s a nice model and it works well. But, Apple is saying that not only do I need their OSX (fine) but I have to use THEIR hardware. There is the rub and where MS does it better.

Anyways.. my impressions up to now with Intel OSX is very favorable. It’s fast, snappy and stable to a fault. I have the feeling that on decent hardware, OSX will be just as stable as it is on Apple hardware. So far as I can see, there is not a visible difference between my using Intel or my using my G5 power PC version, it all looks and acts exactly the same. Kudos to the design teams and engineers.

If you have followed this blog for any length of time, you know I bought a Mini off eBay and I use it for a Postfix email server along with DNS. It has performed these duties with aplomb and now it’s time to start playing a bit more. I added a Newertech external drive (160 gig) a few weeks and now I’m getting ready to install OSX Server on the mini. So I’ve partitioned off the 160 into two partitions and cloned my Mini to one of the partitions. Why clone the Mini? Well, I heard a while back that the mini drive being such a slug would benefit from a firewire drive with a reasonable rotation speed instead of the miserly 4200 RPM of the Mini. And since I have the new 160 gig, it was no great shake to clone the mini and run a few benchmarks. I used Xbench software to test my drives. This software has a cool feature of comparing your stats to an online database of other benchmarks. The short version is that the firewire drive was about 30% faster overall compared to the built in dog of a drive in the Mini. So for the same price as a decent 2.5 inch drive, I was able to get a 160 drive with 7200RPM and more USB/Firewire ports to boot from So, why buy just the drive?

Another fun item is called Ajaxwrite. This site uses the programming language called AJAX to give us a complete word processor via a web browser. It was started by the same fellow that started Lindows now called Linspire due to Microsoft taking offense at the lose relation to the Windows name. And this service is FREE for now. I have also been playing with ThinkFree which is web based by using Java and is also offered as a local client. Both are nicely done but I think that the Ajax solution has the edge for now since Ajax has the speed and response time. But everything changes so it is just a matter of time for Java to catch up.

It’s been done, booting Windows XP on a Intel iMac The directions and custom code needed is available here. The readme file gives the directions on how to build a slipstreamed XP boot disk and how to configure it all. Pretty amazing since Microsoft refused to help with this and basically said that it was not possible. There is a Wiki for help on this project. There is also a forum for help at here. I guess my excuse for not upgrading has been removed Darn.. such a sad state of affairs

Just because you pass a law doesnt make it right or make it a good law. If the elected officials would ever get this through their heads, we would be much better off. The DCMA is a prime example of a major screw up that ends up wasting more time and money than it protects. It has been twisted to try and prevent companies from making universal garage door openers, refilled printer cartridges to music and DVDs. I normally accept reasonable laws as a cost of freedom and even some not so reasonable laws. But, when I purchase a DVD and I want to put the DVD onto my legally purchased iPod for the two year old to watch while eating out and it takes me breaking several laws outright to accomplish this, there is a serious problem. And the problem is not me since Fair Use gives me the right to do just this. So the idiots in congress try to ban the tools to make my legal copy and keep me from being able to do this at the “request” (read as donations) of the various record and film hacks.

So what happens? Well, you can get MacTheRipper from a varity of sites and mirrors, you can use something like Azureus and bittorrent to get the files already ripped. You can read about TPB, The Pirate Bay, over in Sweden where laws are alot more reasonable and you can easily download many different “controlled items”. When will the idiots come to understand “The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.“

So here I am, law abiding lawbreaker because I want to be use my DVD on another player that I own. And yes, I break the literal laws of the DCMA by even writing this down. Just goes to show just badly written these laws are.

Additional Notes:

For grins I used Bittorrent and TPB to get a copy of the Harry Potter DVD. Now mind you, my daughter has already bought her copy so this is an experiment in the literal sense. Given all the hype about bittorrent being used to rip off the studio hacks blind, I was interested in seeing just how well or not it would work. I used Azureus to download a copy of Harry Potter and I found out some interesting things. One, if you do not have a reasonably fast network connection, it will take a long, long, long time. Even with a T1, it took over two days to get the 4 gig file. Now, I did limit the upload to 50Kps which has some bearing on it but still, two days for a 15 dollar DVD is alot of wasted time. The DVD I did end up with was complete and so far as I could tell, good quality. I suspect your milage will vary considerably with the movies and other art type of files. Of course, I had no idea until I had the entire file if the file was even good or bad. So I could have wasted two days trying to get something that in the end, was not worth a nickle.

My own thoughts are this; if the studios keep the costs of the media (CD, DVD etc) down to a very reasonble level (see the success of itunes at 99 cents a song), then most people (myself included) can not be bothered with a two day download that may end up being crap. But, If you insist on excessively high prices, then you have driven the stake into your own heart. Bittorrent and it’s clones do work and work well enough with suffient motivation and patience. And there is a point where people (not just pirates) will turn a blind eye and consider the theft to be “poetic justice” to the fat cats etc..etc. There will always be a subgroup that just steals because they can and in a sense are more of a “collector” than anything else. I remember the days of the Commodore 64 and having hundreds of games, not because one could play them all but because you could have them. Just like a collector, you would hunt for the newest, the hard to find, the cleanest hack and so on. And when technology moved on, all the those collected games became so many relics from the past. DVDs and CDs will do the same in short order so all the effort at “protecting” the IP will end up being just a waste of time and effort.

Tumbling dice, thats what we in IT feel our jobs are like at times. When the dice land right, it’s great, when they land wrong, oh man, so wrong can it be. The good news is that I’m not a programmer today, the programmers are pulling an all nighter to get a data conversion on track and back where it belongs. Poor guys, better you than me. Been there, done that.

Anyways.. back to some of the weekend’s finds. I mentioned that I joined Apple’s development club and I found a very cool presentation on Automator assuming you have membership. If not, I strongly suggest to you to join just to get access to some cool tutorials and information like this.

Go to Apple’s dev site and look for “WWDC Session 130: Writing AppleScript Automator Actions“. Between the video of the session, the PDFs like “Automator Programming Guide” and other goodies, it’s a gold mine of information for those of us who want to really get into the nuts and bolts of Automator.

Before you go there to pore over PDFs, go to this site and check out the PDF browser plugin for Safari. It’s a freebie for home and educational use. I find it very useful to load the PDF right into a browser pane and then decide to keep it or not. Here is the blurb on the plugin:

“The Schubert|it PDF Browser Plugin perfectly integrates into your web browser and with its great Mac look & feel it looks like it always belonged into it. Easy to use and intuitive toolbar buttons give you quick access to the most common features, and a standard Action menu lets you access everything else – even while the toolbar is hidden in cases when you need the maximum screen real estate.”

Enjoy!

Yeah, a poor reference to a movie but that is what my poor Mini is now I have placed it out on the wire as a real email server. And you know, it rocks at being an email server. I am using MailServe which I have talked about before and in the past few months of use, has proven to be very reliable and stable. I have not seen a single hickup contributed to the application. And now I have put in real Apple memory, the Mini is much happier itself. Given how well the Mini works, this is a very viable option for anyone in a small office or even a bigger office with careful tuning. Even with exchange you could use the Mini as the front end given the Mac is inherently more secure than Windows and Postfix with SpamAssasin makes a niffty anti-spam tool.

I love the discussions I have been involved with lately debating the pros and cons of Windows and OSX. People forget that the OS doesnt know who or what it is. Either works and can work well within certain constraints. So to shoot off your mouth that OS A is better than OSB just shows the world A: how biased you are and B: since you are biased, not to believe a word you say. Personally, I use both every single day. There are parts of Windows I despise and there are parts of OSX that could stand to borrow some ideas from Microsoft and I have detailed some of these complaints in the past blogs.

I have a couple of new books that I’m reading. Two are from Spiderworks and the first is called “MAc OS X technology Guide to Automator” which is written by Ben Waldie. Nice book for anyone trying to actually use OSX’s Automator which I am right now. SpamSieve stops spam but doesnt empty the folder so I have a script in Automator that will trash eveything in the folder and then empty the trash. Now I have some other ideas of more advanced scripts using Automator and the book is becoming very useful.

The 2nd book from Spiderworks is “Learn C on the Macintosh OSX Version ” and this is how I am getting back into the saddle of programming again. The last time I wrote a programin C was the days of “Turbo C” by Borland So for those that know, this dates me pretty well. I find the book an easy read with clear examples of code to work with. Next on my list is to learn how to use COCOA to build up some nice GUI interfaces.

Both of these books are PODs just like my own book “Network Security Using Linux” which is published via Lulu.com. With companies like Lulu, being a self published author became MUCH easier. Dont kid yourself, it is still alot of work to get it right but at least the paper side is easier now. The internet really has leveled the playing field in some areas and publishing is one of them.

This post is much more personal than the normal hardware or Mac trash talking post. I lost a good friend this last year. One of my best friends, who’s wife introduced me to my own wife, one who helped me in many ways when I broke my leg in seven places and could not get around for weeks. A guy who I spent many weekends with on our mountain bikes and road bikes taking turns at acting out Monty Python skits while huffing and puffing up hill and dale. A guy who I had many BBQs with in the summer months talking about sports, girls, bikes, and bad TV shows.

You might be think, “so sad, he died” and you would only be partially right. You see, my friend had a massive stroke one morning before work about two years ago. Weeks in the hospital, months in Rehab and my friend is back on his own mostly. I learned alot about strokes in the last two years. I learned that you can suffer much brain damage and some of it doesnt show right away while some does. The sagging face, the slurred speech and other outward signs, most people know about. It’s the inner damage, the hidden damage that causes more pain than anything else. My friend did die that morning, he is dead and gone and the person that is still here is not my friend. The stroke robbed me and other of the man we all knew and replaced him with a stranger in our friend’s body. I’ve read that it takes four years for a family member to admit their spouse or loved one is gone and no longer with them even though the body is still there and much of the person might still be there. But it’s an illusion, smoke and mirrors of the human kind. It is hard to accept at times, when I see something that reminds me so much of my friend’s old self but then like a fleeting ray of sun, it’s bright and then gone. Replaced by someone I really dont know and in truth, I really dont like very much. It feels like a betrayal to say that, to say I dislike my new/old friend but it’s true. He does and says things that I would not tolerate from anyone else and as it turns out, not from him either. I have not spoken to him in almost a year now. Our last exchange was unpleasent and I decided that I could not be a friend anymore to someone who actively pushed me away whether he knows that he is doing it or not.

Strokes are a terrible illness, they rob you of someone you care about and leave a doppleganger in their place. Not to worry, I will have some better things to write about with the Macs but this has been bothering me for a few weeks now and I just needed to get it out.

Thanks for listening.