Dead Ink Vinyl

The OpenLaszlo Project Blog gets some benchmarks of Java performance on the new MacBook, relative to the G5.

So the second thing that happened is that we got a shiny new MacBook. Today I compiled LaszloMail on a co-worker’s desktop G5, and the shiny Intel thing. Ready?

• G5 (dual 2ghz, 1 gig RAM), OpenLaszlo 3.2: 32 seconds
• MacBook Pro (dual core 2ghz, 2 gig RAM), OpenLaszlo 3.2: 17 seconds

Hot damn!

You said it.

Tivo is such a marvelous home appliance. The longer I own it, the more features it gets. What other appliance actually improves with age?

I don’t know when Tivo made the change, but it’s the best update to their software I’ve seen in a while. I recently changed my cable service package and this necessitated repeating the Guided Setup on both of my Tivos. In the past, the worst part of the Guided Setup experience has been trying to match the cable company’s package to the package descriptions provided by Tivo. Nightmare. I never felt completely comfortable that I’d picked the right one.

This time, the Guided Setup didn’t ask me for my cable package. Instead, it tuned to a channel and asked “Do you get this channel?” Rinse, wash, repeat, and Tivo figured out what package I had. Fantastic! This is a simple procedure that produces the correct results with a minimum of confusion for the user. It passes the “would my mom understand this?” test.

Thanks, Tivo, for making a fine product even better.

Ugh. I lost my PB’s hard drive an hour ago. It wasn’t recoverable. OSX froze, which I got miffed about, but when I rebooted the system it shutdown after a long time on the cycling progress circle. Repeated attempts resulted in the same behavior. I pulled out my backup external drive, booted from it, and ran Disk Utility. It tried to repair one file that was reported to be 155TB in size (by setting it to be 0 bytes in size), but that generated a hardware error. The drive could not be erased, either — another hardware error. Finally, I tried repartitioning the drive. That fixed it. Of course, all my data is gone. My last full disk backup was at the end of Februrary. I have a recent-enough backup of my documents and of my mail, but I’ve forever lost some really great photos I took on Friday from my flight lesson and I’ll have to re-purchase some content from iTunes. Of course, I don’t know which content from iTunes was purchased in the last three weeks, except for the Battlestar Galactica episodes.

Grumble, grumble.

So, I’m going to SuperDuper! my backup boot drive to my laptop’s hard drive, then use Backup.app to recover my email, which I had just backed up minutes before the crash. Wish me luck.

Updated 13-Mar-2006 12:15am: Apple’s Backup.app recovered my documents and mail without a hitch. Except that, apparently, it made an incremental backup of my mail to DVD even though it could have made a full backup (it was an empty disk), so I was prompted for the previous DVD backup I’d made to get the process started. I had it, no biggie, but still: feh!