Extended Phenotype

I have to say, lately I’ve been using screen sharing in Leopard a great deal, to work more flexibly around the house. This isn’t much of a concern in Seattle, since my apartment is small enough that I rarely have to move my laptop at all, but at home on the island, I often find myself wanting to work from the living room or by the windows, but not wanting to interrupt some long process I’ve got running over wired ethernet. So I leave my machine where it is, and use a different machine to work from downstairs via screen sharing. No more copying files around, worrying about having every application on every computer, synchronization issues, etc.

Of course, I used to use VNC for this in a limited fashion prior to Leopard, but the way Apple has integrated this into the Finder networking list and with account security is very nice.

And, when my Macbook Air arrives in February, I can really move around, but without worrying whether I can do “heavy” work given the smaller hard drive and memory footprint, since the Air can be just a light “terminal” for a larger machine.

I know, not problems that most people have, but it’s a nice feature of Leopard that I’m coming to really appreciate.

This weekend I started experiencing kernel panics in Leopard. I’d gotten a brand-new 500GB external drive for Time Machine, and turned it loose backing up my Macbook Pro. This worked fine for a day or so, until last night when I started getting kernel panics every time I connected the external drive to the laptop. I can attach it before boot, and it panics during the boot cycle. Boot without the drive, attach it after the machine is up and running, and it panics within a few seconds.

The grey window-shade of doom is starting to really bug me, I gotta say.

It’s a known issue, at least to some Leopard users. Apple has not answered the thread yet, or produced a fix or even diagnosis. It’s early days, but I return to my opinion from a previous post: this operating system wasn’t done baking yet, and Apple took it out of the oven too early. Like a cheesecake that hasn’t set, it’s wobbly and collapsing.

Naturally, everyone says the fix is to turn Disk Utility loose on the external drive, but my attempts to do so thus far have failed because the system panics before I can do so, even if I start Disk Utility running and then attach the drive. Tonight I’m going to boot from the install DVD and run Disk Utility, and see if I can get further. Nevertheless, it seems like unless it’s a simple problem, the solutions here are: (1) Don’t trust Time Machine yet, and (2) Reformat my Time Machine drive and start over.

I seriously hope Apple is burning the midnight oil bugfixing and getting a 10.5.1 ready, because if they think Mac users will be happy to regress back to customers-as-beta-testers mode like most Windows releases, they’re in for a shock. There’s some nice stuff in Leopard, but not nearly enough to live with kernel panics, spinning beach balls, and other weirdness.

I’ve been using OS X 10.5 (Leopard) for a couple of days now, and here’s a couple of reactions. On the positive side, I love the new Mail.app and how it ties into iCal with to-do items. Auto-recognition of addresses, phone numbers and contact info is brilliant. And of course I like Spaces, though since I’ve been using third-party versions for years on both Mac and Windows, and have always had multiple desktops in my Unix window managers, it’s not a big leap to have it built-in.

I haven’t set up Time Machine yet because I need to devote a whole external disk to it, but if it works well I’ll be switching from SuperDuper! to the built-in backup very soon.

Stacks and the new Finder bits are nice organizational tools and fine eye candy, which I’m sure will be second nature soon but I haven’t done much with them as yet.

On the whole I like it. But I have some negative points as well, that point to this release not quite being as fully baked as it should be given the hype.

First, the upgrade wiped out all my printer settings. No printers at all. I cannot imagine why this would be an intentional “feature” — the name, IP address or ports, and driver name for my printers isn’t exactly core to the operating system, so why did Apple decide they needed to be wiped out? And it’s not a ten-second fix here — I have printers at home and at work, at my place in Seattle, so setting all of them up and testing involves being in three different buildings and finding half a dozen sets of drivers (assuming Leopard doesn’t have them already).

Second, there’s some performance issues here. I’m not talking about the sluggishness while Spotlight rebuilt the index from scratch — that’s expected. I’m talking about a generally higher use of CPU all around, probably given all the QuickLook stuff going on anytime I’m in the Finder. Though I don’t really know the source.

Third, Apple needed to run the QA cycle a bit longer. I’ve had to Force Quit a bunch of apps quite a bit — and at least half were Apple’s own apps. System Preferences has spun off into the vortex a couple of times, as has Activity Monitor. C’mon guys — I know I have a lot of software on this machine, and sure, I’m used to Parallels with Vista vortexing occasionally, but I’m killing off hung apps quite a bit for a well-polished major OS release. The goal here is for you to be better than the average Microsoft Windows release, not emulate it.

So that’s where things stand. We’ll see if they improve. Time Machine and Mail.app might be worth the irritations mentioned above. I hope so. And I hope there’s some software updates to fix some of the other bits fairly soon. Because at the end of the day, Time Machine and Mail.app are just apps — the notion that I had to upgrade the OS itself for such functionality is a bit suspect, unless Leopard gives me better stability and performance in the long run.

I’ve been fairly busy lately with some changes, and haven’t had time to write, but the situation is this: I’m un-retired, and working at GridNetworks, in downtown Seattle. Grid is a startup company, begun by Jeff Payne of RealNetworks and Spry/Compuserve, and now involving my business partners Tony Naughtin and Christopher Wheeler, from Internap Network Services and Network Clarity. Jon Miller, formerly of RealNetworks, Internap, and Getty Images, has joined up as well, and thus from my perspective the company is a combination of a “dream team” and a reunion of favorite coworkers from companies spanning a decade.

Our mission is to power the next generation of Internet-based television, delivering high-definition and DVD quality video to computers and a veritable forest of home theatre devices. The slow convergence of real computers, televison, and home theatre setups is well underway, with devices like Tivo HD representing today’s state of the art. GridNetworks delivers the advantages of a traditional CDN (content distribution network) and a new-style P2P (peer-to-peer) network, allowing scalable distribution of the highest quality media. Today, you can download the 1.1 version of our player and GridCasting technology, and soon we’ll talk about the next two generations of our system.

My role is to augment our core technology team by building compelling services for media and content owners of all sizes, from the largest networks to small companies with content that would benefit from high-definition, high-quality distribution. As Product Unit Manager for Content Delivery Services, my role will be to understand each of these markets and tailor services which meet a variety of needs. It’s a different role for me, given that I’ve usually been on the sharp end of core technology in the past, but I’m excited about the company and the job, and I’m sure I’ll talk further after we’ve made additional announcements in coming months.

All of this means that I’m now a long-distance commuter, shuttling back and forth between the island and downtown Seattle. Thanks to Kenmore Air, this isn’t nearly as onerous as it sounds, and often I get to finish off a day at the office with a gorgeous, low-altitude flight over Puget Sound and the myriad of forested islands and coastlines. But it’s an adjustment, as I try to remember whether I left my shaving kit in Seattle or up north, or where I left the latest draft of my dissertation proposal during my free moments. I’ll figure it out soon enough, and settle back into the high-tech world I thought I’d left behind.

You’ll start seeing a new look on Extended Phenotype; much cleaner and more minimal.  I was getting tired of the color and the clutter and the little lists that I never updated.  A couple of readers appear curious about what I’m reading, so I’ve retained the Current Reading list, but much of the rest needed to go. 

The new design allows me some space on the left to eventually figure out a "sidenote" solution, which I’ve wanted for a long time but still can’t quite make work with Typepad’s column layout CSS.  But given the way I write, I like to point out sources or use "footnotes" so that I can document or discuss something without interrupting the main flow (how very academic, I know), and sidenotes are a nice visual way to do that in a web context.  They’re not working yet, but I’ll keep trying.

I’m also a huge typography and typesetting nut, so I like the new look and fans of fonts will recognize the new title banner as Caslon, one of my favorite typefaces.  What I’d really love, I guess, would be a blogging system that used LaTeX on the backend and produced print-quality websites.  But hey, that’s nutty, and I can easily satisfy my interest in kerning and Computer Modern and artistic typesetting by writing scientific articles….