The first items aren’t that interesting. A 360|Flex folder and an Effective UI graph pad I picked up off a table while at that conference (thanks, guys!). I plan to use the graph pad to layout some screens for an upcoming project at work and want to keep it handy in case inspiration strikes. I’m still waiting for that inspiration.

Then I pulled out a two inch thick collection of papers I’d printed (duplex, to conserve paper). On top of the stack is D-Click’s Adobe Flex Coding Guidelines. I really don’t like placing opening braces on their own line. Drives me nuts. (For my money, the Sun Java Coding Conventions can’t be beat.) But, when in Rome, do as the Romans do. I recognize that being consistent (especially across developers on the same team) is more important than the merits of any single convention, so I’m trying to learn new habits.

Next up are printouts of six chapters from Adobe’s Building and Deploying Flex Applications (PDF here). I have only built Flex apps inside of Flex Builder, so I still need to learn the command line tools. My company is big on “repeatable builds”—meaning that any interally-developed production applications should be easy to regenerate from source without developer involvement. In practice, this means that the application must be built with a command line build script (Make, Ant, etc.). Besides, I get nervous when I’m overly dependent on an IDE. I like code completion, syntax highlighting, and refactoring, but I really like to know that I can do it all from vi or Notepad and the raw Flex SDK if desired or needed. Hence my interest in the Building and Deploying Flex Applications book. And I mean book! A full printout would weigh in at 400+ pages! So I picked the most important parts to me and just printed those.

The first chapter is Chapter 3 (Flex Application Structure). I just finished reading this chapter last night. Not a lot to say here. It’s good to have the layout with which I was familiar due to Flex Builder reinforced in print. Next up are Chapter 4 (Applying Flex Security), Chapter 7 (Building Overview), Chapter 9 (Using the Flex Compilers), Chapter 13 (Using ASDoc), and Chapter 14 (Creating Applications for Testing).

Then I come to printouts of various O’Reilly articles about Ruby on Rails that I intend to read Any Day Now™. Rolling with Ruby on Rails Revisited, Cookin’ with Ruby on Rails: May, Cookin’ with Ruby on Rails: Designing for Testability, Cookin’ with Ruby on Rails: More Designing for Testability.

And finally, I have Greg Hamer’s presentation slides for introducing Cairngorm at 360|Flex. I suppose I can take this out of my bag. I have the general idea of how Cairngorm works. I’m still waiting to write an app large enough to make playing with Cairngorm worthwhile. Okay, that’s not quite right. I’m still working on my first Flex app ever. I’m plugging into the 37signals Backpack API. When I’m done with that, I might look at refactoring it for Cairngorm just to get that experience under my belt.

And that’s wy my computer bag weighs a ton. What’s in your computer bag?

Okay, the term “benchmark” might be too strong. I ran one of my favorite applets on the 15″ MacBook Pro while at an Apple Store today. I took screen shots of the results to compare to the performance of my own PowerBook. The applet is a 3D visualization of a KohonenSelf-Organizing Map. The Kohonen Map is a type of neural network used to automatically group similar inputs and provide visiualization of large quantities of data. Another interesting application of the Kohonen Map is to solve very large TSP-type problems.
Anyway, this applet is interesting because it has simple 3D graphics, lots of floating point and integer math, and possibly a good amount of object allocation and garbage collection. I don’t know if the applet is multi-threaded, though, but by the results I would guess that it is not. Thus, this is a highly imperfect comparison between the PPC and Intel Macs.

System specs:
PPC: 17″ 1.33GHz PowerBook with 1.0GB RAM
Intel: 15″ 2.0GHz MacBook Pro with 1.5GB RAM

Raw Results:
PPC:

Intel:

Numbers:
PPC: 1107 learning cycles in 138.697 seconds (7.981 learning cycles / second)
Intel: 1100 learning cycles in 62.514 seconds (17.62 learning cycles / second)

X-Factor:
The MacBook Pro is 2.2x faster than my PowerBook on Java performance. Assuming that the applet is single-threaded, the MacBook’s JVM 1.47x more efficient per CPU clock cycle.

I’d like to also note that the applet’s 3D animation was much smoother on the MacBook than it was on my PowerBook.

However, I noticed that she was vertically scrolling her applications “the old fashioned way”, like have to on my PowerBook: by moving the mouse cursor to manipulate the scroll bar. I showed her how to scroll by using two fingers and she was ecstatic. A few days later that I observed that she had entirely converted to two-fingered-scrolling and that it was really working out for her.

Every once in a while, she would hand me the iBook to look at something on the screen, such as a Web site, and I would get to use the two-fingered scrolling. I started envying her that feature. It works so smoothly, so intuitively, I would find myself trying to use it when I returned to my PowerBook.

I tried gaining similar functionality using SideTrack but scrolling along the right side of the pad never clicked with me. I recalled seeing a couple of drivers for earlier iBooks and PowerBooks that mimicked the two-fingered scrolling. Performing a Google search I found iScroll2.

I’ve been using iScroll2 now for three weeks. It’s a good product and hasn’t demonstrated any undesirable side-effects on my PowerBook, which is running 10.4.3. It isn’t quite as smooth or slick as the native support in my wife’s iBook — in particular, it doesn’t alway’s “catch” when I’m using two fingers and it’s scrolling is a little jumpy when it does — but it is an adequate solution for me.

Anyway, I want to thank the team at PB FixIt — they did a great job with their walk through. Their instructions were dead-on for disassembling my laptop.

I would add just three small items to those who may follow in my footsteps. The first item sounds pretty brain-dead, but is easy enough to forget as a PowerBook owner: shutdown the laptop before starting. This is worth mentioning because as a Mac user I’ve grown so comfortable with the Sleep mode that I think “sleep = off”. The other thing I would note is on page 6: the orange cables are disconnected from the motherboard by pulling straight up. I didn’t enjoy having to guess at something like that with a very expensive motherboard at stake. Finally, the guide needs to mention that when you’re attaching the upper case (keyboard, trackpad, et al) you want to make sure the trackpad ribbon (from page 3) is properly positioned through its slot or you won’t be able to reach it when it’s time to plug it back in.

And you need to plug in the “trackpad ribbon”. It turns out that the “trackpad ribbon” isn’t just for the trackpad. It’s for everything on the upper case that needs to talk with the motherboard: keyboard, trackpad, and power button. I happened to have missed this step and my PowerBook was a brick when I was done assembling it. A brick. A paperweight. It didn’t work. It didn’t start. It didn’t do anything. I pressed the power button and… nothing. Not a whir, a light, nor a chirp. Absolute nothing. It is a very eerie sensation, followed by a little bit of panic. I did figure out pretty quickly that I’d skipped a step in my rush to enjoy my new system, and then discovered that I had to go all the way back to pulling off the upper case to fix my oversight. I hope I’ve saved you that trouble. Now you know what to look for first if your PowerBook won’t start after a hard drive replacement or upgrade.

I dropped the old 80GB disk into a MacAlly 2.5″ Firewire enclosure. The enclosure really impresses me. I also own standard size enclosure from MacAlly and I think very highly of both products. The 2.5″ is a really solid piece of work. I read some reviews that bad-mouthed it because it doesn’t come with a DC power adapter, which is needed when running from USB. However, the drive does come with a second USB cable that plugs into the DC power port, so you just need to plug that into a powered USB port to pull the necessary power to run the drive. (Since USB sucks, it doesn’t bother to provide enough power on its own.) Of course, if you simply use the Firewire connector, all the necessary power is pulled from that and you don’t need to fool with any of this USB nonsense.

I booted from a different Firewire drive that had an old image of my main disk, then used SuperDuper! to clone the old 80GB drive onto the new 100GB drive and rebooted. (I’m aware of CCC, but I find SuperDuper! sufficiently superior to CCC that I’m willing to pay for the utility.)

Having decided to take the plunge, I needed to pick a hard drive and learn how to install it. Enter PB FixIt. This site is fantastic. They have walk-throughs for all of the common maintenance and upgrades for all PowerBook and iBook models, including a list of the tools required before getting started. Even better: if you’re like me and don’t know a Spudger from a T6 Torx Screwdriver, they let you purchase the tools directly from them! It was so convenient, I went ahead and ordered the three tools I’d need for the job. They arrived just two days later.

I poked around a picked out the Hitachi TravelStar 7K100 (which was just reviewed in a notebook drive round-up) as my new hard drive. I also ordered a MacAlly 2.5″ external case to house the 80GB drive I’ll be taking out of my laptop. When those arrive, I will walk through the procedure and let you know how it all turns out.

I had the drives hooked up to my LinkSys NSLU2 NAS controller. I love the NSLU2. It’s a sub-$100 NAS device that provides permission-based SMB (Windows file sharing) access to two USB2.0 hard drives. It is very small, runs Linux, and is very easy to control.

Anyway, I had the two ACOM Data drives attached to the NSLU2. I didn’t trust the drives, so I setup the NSLU2 to use one as a backup drive for the other. I dumped all kinds of content onto the NAS to be shared between my Dell (WinXP) and PowerBook (MacOSX) computers. Since both computers are locked-down and running their own firewalls, it’s next to impossible to get them to share files directly. Thus, the NAS filer is a very nice solution.

The fan died on the first ACOM Data drive several months ago. Cracking the hard drive’s case is next to impossible without breaking everything (it’s all plastic without screws), so left the drive for dead. A month ago the other drive’s fan gave out. I picked up a nice LaCie drive to replace the two ACOM duds. Now I attempting to get the data off the old drive and onto the new one.

Here is where the Linux under-pinnings of the NSLU2 became a liability. The NSLU2 uses the EXT3 filesystem common to Linux. It’s a great filesystem, but I happen to no longer have a Linux workstation or server in my residence. I could plug both drives into the NSLU2 and use its interface to copy over the contents, but I would like more fine-grain control over the process to copy the most important content first. That’s the degree to which I distrust the ACOM Data drive lasting through the operation.

I thought I was in good shape because I have a KNOPPIX 3.7 CD. I’d never used it, but I’d read such good things about it… Well, it doesn’t boot on my Dell box. It gets past the LILO prompt and starts recognizing hardware, but it quickly kernel panics that it cannot read init. Hmph. I’m grabbing build 02 of 3.7, which may work better. In the mean time, I am fanning the flame of hope that I’ll find a way to read EXT3 under MacOSX. I’m giving Mac OS X Ext2 Filesystem a shot.