Quarter Life Crisis

Copying the Mac OS X Install DVD¶

I rather dislike having to start my computer from a DVD. It is noisy and takes ages. As the braindead Mac OS X installer (unlike its ‘Classic’ predecessors) needs the system to be booted from a special partition to do its magic, this means that having to install a system is both a pain and a waste of time.

The pain can be reduced by having a copy of the system CD on a spare hard drive partition. The machine can easily copy the DVD over and in case you need it - i.e. after the proverbial shit hit the equally proverbial fan - you’ll have an install medium that’s quite quick. Unfortunately Apple’s system DVDs or Disk Utility don’t come with instructions how to make such a copy.

Pierre Igot recently discussed this issue for the slightly different topic of installing system software on a machine without a DVD reader. And along the same lines - though tested for Mac OS X.5 on my current MacBook only - I can recommend the following steps:

1. Make sure you have a hard drive large enough to contain the install DVD (10GB should be plenty, 8 will do)
2. Use the command

   asr restore --source /Volumes/Mac\ OS\ X\ Install\ DVD --target /Volumes/Empty Hard Drive/ --erase --disableOwners

   In which volume names are adjusted for your setup of course.

There’s no step 3. The magic asr command will copy the image over to the hard drive partition, deleting the previous contents of the partition in the progress and ‘blessing’ the partition to be recognised as bootable in the process. It’s really quite an easy thing to do.

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August Films¶

This month with Sweet and Lowdown, Rushmore and The Anderson Tapes.

Sweet and Lowdown

In Woody Allen’s 1999 Sweet and Lowdown we are taken to the recession area and follow the career and affairs of jazz guitar hero (second only to Django Reinhardt!) Emmett Ray. He loves his music, fancies but doesn’t love the girls and treats them accordingly, tends to be less than reliable, faints when meeting the mighty Reinhard and gains pleasure from listening to trains.

Not a particularly exciting story and a bit slow even, but still fun to watch. I rather liked the way they mocked the current documentary style with close up shots of people commenting on the documented while their credentials are neatly written beneath.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Rushmore

Wes Anderson’s 1999 film Rushmore starts off situated in the posh world of a private school but unlike in Anderson’s newer films, the protagonist Max drops out ouf that framework because he’s too focused on starting new clubs and having a crush on one of the teachers to actually do his homework or behave in the way he is expected.

After being relegated to a run-of-the mill public school, Max takes some time to adjust to the new environment but finally manages to fit in much better. Particularly as he can now own up to his dad being a barber and doesn’t have to pretend being rich. After his crush on the teacher fades, we even head for a happy end.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Also amusing, btw, is the Wes Anderson short film Hotel Chevalier, which can be taken as giving background for The Darjeeling Limited in giving us a little information about Jack’s past. Ah well, and same actor as in Rushmore, just a bit older…

The Anderson Tapes

I have a weakness for old-fashioned films about clever heists. Even more so when, like The Anderson Tapes, they’re directed by Sidney Lumet and when you think the protagonist is James Bond because he’s played by Sean Connery. The bad thing is that - tragically - the police always have to catch the thieves. It seems unrealistic and tragic as well. As some old ladies in the film remark correctly, at least the holdup brings some excitement into their lives.

Extra brownie points for clever suspicion about surveillance technology and the protagonist John opening the film with

What’s advertising but a legalized con game? And what the hell’s marriage? Extortion, prostitution, soliciting with a government stamp on it. And what the hell’s your stock market? A fixed horse race. Some business guy steals a bank, he’s a big success story. Face in all the magazines. Some other guy steals the magazine and he’s busted.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

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Google Tabs¶

So the whole web is abuzz of Google announcing a browser of their own, Google Chrome. It is WebKit based so the Mac people can enjoy a bit of smugness, and it goes all tabs - as in each tab is a browser of its own but magically they all pretend to be a single browser application. Which sounds like a sweet idea because nobody loves their whole browser stalling because one tab is misbehaving (I do suspect though, that deinstalling the Flash plugin would solve many of those problems, but how would one procrastinate on YouTube without it?)

Google’s hype for their new idea is ‘communicated’ by a comic book. It reads like marketing drivel and I find it hard to see why people think it’s great. Apparently there’s some big name comic drawer involved, but who’d give a fuck in promo material?

The interesting question is, however, where this will lead us. In a way it’s freaky. Google already own pretty much all parts of the web that are not on your computer and now they want to come over and own the rest. Seeing that so far Google managed to create services that are far better than their competitors’ - thanks to both their ad billions and keeping their staff in a good mood, I guess - there’s a chance that this could actually work. On the other hand we have seen Google’s other offerings for local applications like their Google Desktop software which mostly suck. This is definitely uncharted territory for them. No risk, no fun, I guess.

With their cartoon thingy making a big deal about each browser tab being a process of its own (who’d care about such gritty details?) - and it apparently even bringing along something as idiotic as a process manager of its own - this sounds as if the whole thing may end up being an ‘interesting’ UI challenge as well. Is it possible to get a whole bunch of processes to present a smooth single application GUI to a user? Intuitively I would have doubted that. But I guess we’ll get an opportunity to check out the magic skills of Google’s coding wizards on this issue at some stage.

There is no doubt Google have done a lot for developing interactivity on the web. They had the balls to do big scale JavaScript stuff (Maps, Spreadsheets, …) with all the power, non-linkability and non webbish UI coming with that. And having those certainly gave an incentive for browser makers to improve their DOM scripting support and performance.

In my usual browsing experience the most common problems at this time are ads and embedded Flash thingies. And I am tempted to think that being able to rid web pages of those easily would considerably improve my experience of the web. Unfortunately Google don’t seem to be interested in those obvious and low-profile improvements.

Instead they make a big deal about ‘open source’ (whatever the advantage of that may be - let’s hope their assumed improvements to WebKit actually make it back into Safari), and about their fairly good knowledge of the web and popular sites to streamline testing (can other browser developer use those data as well?)

It will be interesting to watch this, but personally I am sceptical about putting the tabs outside the window. I am sceptical about browser windows opening with a lot of distractions in them when they are empty and I fear that its advantages in efficiency may be minimal on systems with their menu bar at the top of the screen. I like clever completion of things I type as well as instant searches. I am also amused by Porn Mode making it to to other browsers.

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Also: official PR post • Lukas Mathis stating that this solves the wrong problem • No font embedding in there yet as well as lesser shadows and rounded corners. The maker of that last picture also notes that the user agent string of Google’s browser is Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13 which makes you wonder whether by 2020 user agent strings will consist of the entire version history of a browser along with a copy of your DNA… • John Siracusa admires the boldness - the benefits of which I still fail to see.

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1980s¶

The landscapes may have been nice, but staying in a hotel which looked like nothing had been done to it since the 1980s was a shame. Having a room whose window faces a wall rather than the pretty landscape didn’t help either. At least their Arial and incompetent apostrophe ridden web site doesn’t come as a surprise with this in mind.

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Water¶

Starting the weekend with a picknick at the Main in Frankfurt and the rest of it just next to the Rhein a bit further on, I couldn’t help thinking that having water around is a good thing.

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Upselling¶

While services sound like a good idea, I frequently hate them. Be it because the people who do them suck, because they are superfluous or both.

The most recent scam I ran into was the ‘service’ they offered at a petrol station: Some guy was running around the offering to do the refuelling for me. Now I am perfectly able to do that myself, it’s a perfectly trivial task. I guess it could be convenient if I could have just remained in the car - just as it’s done in South Africa - but here I had to walk over to the counter for paying anyway, reducing my potential advantage from this to zero.

What added insult to injury, however, was that the guy first told me to he’d do the refuelling for me and then asked me which fuel I wanted. Listing only ‘super’ and some even more crackpot overpriced variant as options, while not asking for the cheaper ‘normal’ fuel that’s perfectly good enough for the car. This kind of ‘upselling’ is just distasteful [I guess any kind of upselling is. I still distinctly remember us wanting to get a Coke at a drive in in the U.S. and them asking us whether we wanted a burger with it…] and I recommend suspecting me in case a few petrol stations in my vicinity explode in the near future.

Friggin morons.

And as marketing and upselling ‘experts’ are wont to do these days, the guy at the cashier had to ask me whether I liked that new ‘service’. Being my usual charming self I told him it was completely useless to which he only shrugged. How very helpful. One wonders why they bother to ask…

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Rubber¶

So apparently the rubber of tyres shouldn’t look like this after a few years…

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Progress¶

Mac OS X loves displaying progress windows. Presumably because it loves progress. Progress in copying or moving files, progress in deleting items in the Trash, progress in deleting items from a backup, progress in mounting a disk image, progress in connecting to a server, progress in burning a CD, progress in compressing or decompressing files.

Unfortunately all of these kinds of progress are displayed in a window of their own. Which means that you can easily end up with different progress windows covering each other and having to ‘manage’ your progress windows to actually benefit from the information they display. To me it would seem much cleaner to have a single window which displays all the progress panels for file or Finder based tasks. That would seem less disorganised.

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