gtuhl: startup IT and software development

Now that i’ve had a macbook pro for several months and feel that I know my way around the OS quite well I thought I would share the things that I do not like about it to follow up on my initial impressions. There are loads of things to like and you can find those lists all over the internet so I am going to focus on the negatives for 1 post.

• Kernel panics. With Leopard i’ve had 8 - 10 kernel panics in total. They show you a fancy screen that tries to make it feel better than the windows blue and white but the effect is the same. This never happened a single time with my linux workstation (I never had to reboot it after a year+ of use) and it also almost never happened with any of the Windows machines i’ve had since Windows 98.
• Updates require restarts. OSX is no better than windows in this regard. The reminders are just as annoying as well.
• Proprietary file formats. The mac doesn’t place a line break (as recognized by Linux/Unix/Windows) in plain-text files so your data is completely useless (all collapsed into 1 line) until you run it through mac2unix on a Linux machine. This behavior is even worse than that of windows. Why does grab spit out .tiffs? Why do .picts exist?
• Proprietary file systems. HFS+ can’t be mounted in read/write on a Linux system. This was an unpleasant surprise when I grabbed my timemachine-formatted external drive to snag a file off a server. Why don’t they use ext3, xfs, zfs, or anything else that is already out there and works just as well?
• Case Sensitivity. I’ve already posted about this. Very frustrating to me that it was ever case insensitive and that the installer allowed me to select an option that prevented my macbook pro from running supported software.
• Spaces Bugs. I’ve had it happen a half dozen times where if you move away from your current “space” and then come back the applications in that space aren’t rendered. They are still running and their menus are visible, but there is no way to see the windows again. They have to be quit and restarted which really, really sucks for certain applications.
• Display Bugs. The brightness of the screen will not stay where I set it (max). It always slides to about 75% and I have found absolutely no way to prevent this from happening.
• Flimsy Screen. I wish the screen on the macbook pro stayed in place. It will move back/forward at the slightest touch. This doesn’t come into play too often but there have been multiple times where I had to sit up straighter than I would like because the screen kept closing.
• Key Shortcuts not on Keyboard. Loads of application list shortcuts involving shift, alt, command, etc and they all use weird symbols (sometimes different) that are not physically printed on the keyboard. An up arrow is shift, a inverted L-looking shape is alt. What is up with this? Windows and Linux do the far more intuitive thing of saying “shift” when they mean shift and “alt” when they mean alt.

I run this machine pretty hard and overall I still prefer the Mac over my previous machines but it is far from perfect. I’ve heard there is a mega-patch wrapping up testing for Leopard on the way and I hope that some of these issues will go away then.

Has been released. http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=48339.

There are some seriously wicked additions in this “point release.” I am a complete postgres zealot as I believe their technology is superior (will happily share my thoughts and real production experience on this), their core team and developers are extraordinarily qualified and the community is incredibly responsive, available, and helpful.

HOT, piggy-backing of sequential table scans, and the new data types (UUID, Enum) are probably my most anticipated for the moment given current workloads but the feature list is stupidly impressive. Pretty much any bullet item I can read and immediately recognize specific areas of our application that will benefit.

I’m going to push this sucker out to production as soon as possible, i’ll post if there are any issues but there won’t be because if I do hit a snag there are people accessible on the mailing lists who will write and provide a patch to fix it faster than Oracle or MS could get the issue typed out in their issue trackers.