Sunday, January 13, 2008

Random Macbook geekery

I still love my Macbook. MacOSX Leopard (now that the latest updates have been installed) is super-stable and super-fast and even X11 now works right -- even over the network (just pop open a "Terminal" window, ssh to a Linux box, type "xemacs /etc/fstab" and... voila, you get an Emacs window on your local console!). And unlike Linux, heavy disk activity going on in the background doesn't kill the OS. Sure, you get a little sluggish, but you don't just freeze up like Linux. It has that low latency BSD scheduling goodness going on.

Right now I'm cleaning up space on my Macbook to make room for Logic Studio. I'm copying a bunch of ISO's and videos off to my Linux server, I can get to them anytime I want via the wireless or wired networks so that's not a bad thing, and deleting a bunch of old downloads that are no longer applicable (e.g., multiple old versions of Firefox and Parallels). I also cleaned up my Windows virtual machine (Parallels), deleting a bunch of stuff that I didn't need as well as all the various snapshots (which were taking up tons of space), and am running the Parallels Compressor for Windows to make the virtual disk smaller.

One word of warning about Parallels Compressor for Windows though -- this thing is super-slow. I started it at midnight last night. It's still going on. And my Windows install didn't have a super-lot of data in it -- only 6gb, because I only use it for things that cannot be done from MacOS (e.g., update my Nokia N800 to the latest OS2008, or upload maps to my Garmin GPS). Looking at the progress bar it should be done shortly, but still, 12 hours to compress 6gb of data? Slow slow SW! (And it's not because my hard drive is slow either, Windows Compressor is writing at over 10mb/sec). By comparison, 'zip' will zip up 45gb of data in about 3 hours on this same system (that's a backup of my /User/badtux directory).

So anyhow, I'm geeking out today. Blogging about the multiple disasters that are America's political scene will resume when I get the mood to observe disasters going down.

-- Badtux the MacPenguin

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