I've had the macbook pro for a good 18+ months now. Super computer, with very few complaints:
1. Sometimes starts up and not all of the lights on the bottom of the screen activate. This is a well-known problem, but no known solution.
2. Battery life stinks. I get a max of 3 hours. After a year I got about 15 minutes, but applecare replaced with a new battery.
And some great features:
1. Multi-touch touchpad is unbelievably awesome. I wish they made an external one so I could have one on my desktop PC.
2. Power supply; the magnetic quick-release connector, the flip out wings to wrap the cord around, the pull-off plug adapter and included 3-prong cord to make it longer when desired. Great design all around.
3. Keyboard, screen, performance, etc. are all great. No complaints there.
I've had the probook 5310m for a couple of days. Very nice computer, some complaints:
1. Power supply is nowhere near as nice as the apple one, but gets the job done, and size/weight is comparable if you include the longer apple cord.
2. Touch pad doesn't have multi-touch :(. Scroll 'wheel' is a strip down the side. Functional but total crap compared to the macbook. It's also got a glossy finish which is slightly tacky when new. I've noticed it's smoother now, maybe just a layer of skin oil on it now.
3. Glossy black finish is a fingerprint magnet. This laptop is going to look perpetually dirty.
4. DisplayPort may be a standard, but they should include a VGA adapter in the box. I've hooked it up to a few VGA monitors (with a 3rd party adapter) with mixed success.
Some great features:
1. Size/weight is ideal for travel. 13" screen is small, but not TOO small.
2. Keyboard is full size and comfortable for typing.
3. Better WiFi reception than the macbook, I can see 3-4 extra wireless networks from my kitchen table.
4. Mobile broadband is built in which is awesome. One less dongle to carry around.
5. Minimal crapware from HP. This is some, to be sure, but not as bad as I expected.
6. Built-in SD reader is very handy, plus 3 USB ports
7. Quicklook, which I thought was a gimmick is an extremely useful feature. Press a single button and within seconds you can enter a PIN code and view your most-recently-synced email/contacts/calendar from Exchange/outlook. You can't check messages or reply to them, but as a reference to look up a number, check a schedule, etc. it's great.
8. The other quicklook feature, a fully-functional web browser environment (seriously, fully functional -- you can watch youtube videos, have multiple tabs, view PDF files, etc.
Overall the probook is a better traveler, while the macbook is a better notebook -- I can run windows or mac on it and everything is just better. But for travel the HP 5310m is 1.5lbs lighter, smaller, has mobile broadband built in, gets better wifi reception, and is comparable performance-wise.
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Snow Leopard vs. Windows 7
I had the interesting experience of wanting to load Windows 7 on my mac book pro as a bootcamp partition. I tried to create a bootcamp partition but my drive was too fragmented and bootcamp told me to boot from the install CD, use disk utility from there to make a backup, then restore it.
OK, a little scary but I'll give it a shot. So I did a backup to a portable hard drive. 120GB. Went great. I figured I was golden. Blew away the hard drive, restored teh backup. Went fine. System then refused to boot. Hmmm. Restarted install CD and tried restoring again. Got an error that said my backup DMG file had "no mountable file system". Crap. Long story short, this is a known problem, lots of other people get the same thing. I have essentially lost my old system. Oh well, the only really important stuff on it was my itunes library, and I was able to recover most of that from my ipod.
Hmmmm. Well, bootcamp on 10.5 isn't supposed to officially support windows 7 so I got snow leopard and reloaded as a new system. Did the bootcamp and windows 7 install. Everything went smoothly.
Some observations on Snow Leopard:
1. My HP officejet printer works great under windows, but the mac takes minutes to connect/print. I finally changed from bonjour to an IP printer and it works a lot better, but 10.5 worked fine with it. Bizarre.
2. Quicktime has an ugly new icon. Really ugly. It also doesn't persist the location of the toolbar on full screen mode. I lost my codecs with the system reload, but perian was a quick download and everything then worked. Flip4mac works, but instead of a 30-second "importing" screen in quicktime, the WMV files immediately start playing, but you can't zip part-way through immediately, the progress bar slowly fills in, presumably as the movie is 'imported'.
3. A Sierra Wireless "Aircard" WWAN adapter works fine under windows, fine under 10.5, but couldn't get it working under 10.6.
4. I honestly haven't been too much in the Mac so can't speak to much else on the Mac.
Some observations on Windows 7 on a Mac:
1. Bootcamp worked fine. Install went great up until the "press ctrl-alt-del" screen, where the mac's delete key didn't work, and in combination with the fn key still didn't work. Finally hooked up an external USB keyboard to get past that. The bootcamp drivers fixed this, so now ctrl-alt-del works normally.
2. Windows 7 is great. Runs perfectly on the macbook pro. No complaints. It's windows, but that's kind of the whole point.
3. There still doesn't seem to be any reasonable windows alternative to Omni Outliner Pro. Microsoft Onenote does a good job replacing Voodoopad and an new "snipping tool" takes care of the selective screenshot feature you get with a key-combination on mac os X.
4. You can browse your mac files from windows, as bootcamp seems to install a driver to mount HFS+ drives in windows. This is a great feature, but you can't mount DMG files, can't mount filevault user directories, and it doesn't honor security settings. If you have files you don't want windows users to see (e.g., maybe you run windows for business presentations, and don't want your giant music collection showing up on the screen) you'll have to move them into a DMG file.
OK, a little scary but I'll give it a shot. So I did a backup to a portable hard drive. 120GB. Went great. I figured I was golden. Blew away the hard drive, restored teh backup. Went fine. System then refused to boot. Hmmm. Restarted install CD and tried restoring again. Got an error that said my backup DMG file had "no mountable file system". Crap. Long story short, this is a known problem, lots of other people get the same thing. I have essentially lost my old system. Oh well, the only really important stuff on it was my itunes library, and I was able to recover most of that from my ipod.
Hmmmm. Well, bootcamp on 10.5 isn't supposed to officially support windows 7 so I got snow leopard and reloaded as a new system. Did the bootcamp and windows 7 install. Everything went smoothly.
Some observations on Snow Leopard:
1. My HP officejet printer works great under windows, but the mac takes minutes to connect/print. I finally changed from bonjour to an IP printer and it works a lot better, but 10.5 worked fine with it. Bizarre.
2. Quicktime has an ugly new icon. Really ugly. It also doesn't persist the location of the toolbar on full screen mode. I lost my codecs with the system reload, but perian was a quick download and everything then worked. Flip4mac works, but instead of a 30-second "importing" screen in quicktime, the WMV files immediately start playing, but you can't zip part-way through immediately, the progress bar slowly fills in, presumably as the movie is 'imported'.
3. A Sierra Wireless "Aircard" WWAN adapter works fine under windows, fine under 10.5, but couldn't get it working under 10.6.
4. I honestly haven't been too much in the Mac so can't speak to much else on the Mac.
Some observations on Windows 7 on a Mac:
1. Bootcamp worked fine. Install went great up until the "press ctrl-alt-del" screen, where the mac's delete key didn't work, and in combination with the fn key still didn't work. Finally hooked up an external USB keyboard to get past that. The bootcamp drivers fixed this, so now ctrl-alt-del works normally.
2. Windows 7 is great. Runs perfectly on the macbook pro. No complaints. It's windows, but that's kind of the whole point.
3. There still doesn't seem to be any reasonable windows alternative to Omni Outliner Pro. Microsoft Onenote does a good job replacing Voodoopad and an new "snipping tool" takes care of the selective screenshot feature you get with a key-combination on mac os X.
4. You can browse your mac files from windows, as bootcamp seems to install a driver to mount HFS+ drives in windows. This is a great feature, but you can't mount DMG files, can't mount filevault user directories, and it doesn't honor security settings. If you have files you don't want windows users to see (e.g., maybe you run windows for business presentations, and don't want your giant music collection showing up on the screen) you'll have to move them into a DMG file.
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Syncing second hand on my seiko watch
Finally! I found this, which explains how to sync the second hand on a seiko watch. I've had my "Orange Monster" for a couple of years now, and love it except for two things:
1: When months have 30 days you have to follow a reset procedure to get the day of week and day of month to sync up.
2: There was no obvious way to get the second hand to sync exactly with reality.
I've gotten used to the first thing -- no big deal, and the second I've got an answer for! In case the link above doesn't work anymore, the trick is to pull the crown out so you can adjust the minutes/hours, turn backwards a minute or so and hold with gentle pressure. Too much and the second hand moves backwards a bit, too little and it keeps going forward, just right it freezes.
Here's a link to the watch itself, I really like the watch, and not just because orange is my favorite color...
1: When months have 30 days you have to follow a reset procedure to get the day of week and day of month to sync up.
2: There was no obvious way to get the second hand to sync exactly with reality.
I've gotten used to the first thing -- no big deal, and the second I've got an answer for! In case the link above doesn't work anymore, the trick is to pull the crown out so you can adjust the minutes/hours, turn backwards a minute or so and hold with gentle pressure. Too much and the second hand moves backwards a bit, too little and it keeps going forward, just right it freezes.
Here's a link to the watch itself, I really like the watch, and not just because orange is my favorite color...
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Minibulldesign Voodoo 3 & krazy kooking kit demo video
Youtube sort of cropped the top & bottom a little, but still watchable...
Monday, April 27, 2009
Printing from Windows to Mac-shared printer
Just figured this out, fairly simple but differed from other instructions I've seen:
From the Mac:
1. open a command prompt
2. cupsctl _remote_admin=1
3. open a browser w/out any proxy settings, go to http://localhost:631
4. "Add Printer"
5. Give it a simple (<12 character, no spaces, no funny characters) name and whatever description you want.
6. Pick the correct device, in my case a USB-attached deskjet.
7. Pick the correct driver, or browse for the PPD file. If the driver isn't listed and you don't know where the ppd file is, look in /etc/cups/ppd. You probably can't browse there with the web browser, so use the command line and copy one to a place you can see.
8. Print a test page just to make sure cups is cool with the config.
9. go to the "Administration" tab and check "allow printing from the Internet" and uncheck "allow remote administration", then click "Change settings" button.
From Windows:
1. Get into the add a new printer wizard
2. give a URL for the printer of http://your_mac_name_or_ip_address:631/printers/PrinterNameYouGaveItInStep5
3. Pick the right driver from the list, or find the driver -- if you don't know how to do this look for help elsewhere.
4. Print a test page to make sure it's all working.
That's it!
From the Mac:
1. open a command prompt
2. cupsctl _remote_admin=1
3. open a browser w/out any proxy settings, go to http://localhost:631
4. "Add Printer"
5. Give it a simple (<12 character, no spaces, no funny characters) name and whatever description you want.
6. Pick the correct device, in my case a USB-attached deskjet.
7. Pick the correct driver, or browse for the PPD file. If the driver isn't listed and you don't know where the ppd file is, look in /etc/cups/ppd. You probably can't browse there with the web browser, so use the command line and copy one to a place you can see.
8. Print a test page just to make sure cups is cool with the config.
9. go to the "Administration" tab and check "allow printing from the Internet" and uncheck "allow remote administration", then click "Change settings" button.
From Windows:
1. Get into the add a new printer wizard
2. give a URL for the printer of http://your_mac_name_or_ip_address:631/printers/PrinterNameYouGaveItInStep5
3. Pick the right driver from the list, or find the driver -- if you don't know how to do this look for help elsewhere.
4. Print a test page to make sure it's all working.
That's it!
Thursday, October 23, 2008
mscom misery continues
Everything looked good and looked like it was working. Then I tried to run a report and the *#&$&% thing wouldn't work. Traced to a permissions error on the .net framework directory on the sql server, AND the #*$*%( proxy server issue again. Only this time it wouldn't go away.
Finally found a setting under the administration view that let you set the report server location, which was at http://sqlservername:80/ReportServer -- "fixed it" to http://sqlservername.domain.com/ReportServer and NOW it freakin' works. Arghh!
Tomorrow: The SP1 install...
Finally found a setting under the administration view that let you set the report server location, which was at http://sqlservername:80/ReportServer -- "fixed it" to http://sqlservername.domain.com/ReportServer and NOW it freakin' works. Arghh!
Tomorrow: The SP1 install...
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
MSCOM reporting install mystery
MSCOM (Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007) has been giving me fits for the past week or so. I got the base system working but could never seem to get past the reporting service installation.
First the reporting service would complain the SRS verification failed. After a lot of digging and googling, and trying a _lot_ of different things (uninstalling mscom and starting over, deleting and recreating databases, verifying and re-verifying that the SRS settings as seen in the "Reporting Services Configuration" screen were OK, setting permissions on the .Net framework directory, and probably a lot more, it came down to one thing:
The proxy server. We deploy (force) proxy server use via GPO. The proxy pac file sends local stuff over the local network and remote stuff through the proxy server. The SCOM-Reporting install wizard was checking to make sure SRS was working, by going to http://SQLSERVERNAME:80/reports. I'd checked via IE that http://localhost/reports and http://SQLSERVERNAME/reports worked fine. Apparently the :80 threw off the proxy settings and a 'proxy requires authentication' message showed up in the MOMREporting.LOG file stored in %TEMP%.
So I added my user account to the proxy exclusion group and logged back in. This time the wizard sailed through, took the credentials for the data warehouse and data reader accounts, then promptly died again. More digging, and this time I came up a 'UnableToGetUserNameFromManagementServerSDKAccount' error. This googled nicely into a MS KB article suggesting it was a disjointed namespace issue and listed a hotfix to work around it. Since I know I didn't have a disjointed namespace I tried again, only this time when it asked what my management server was instead of putting in the FQDN (e.g., mscom.ad.domain.com) I just put in 'mscom' (the hostname) by itself.
The wizard ran to completion and now it's all set up. YAY!
I've played with mscom a bit and see that it has a fairly steep learning curve, but if the install was this hard to finally get right... This is probably going to result in more posts...
First the reporting service would complain the SRS verification failed. After a lot of digging and googling, and trying a _lot_ of different things (uninstalling mscom and starting over, deleting and recreating databases, verifying and re-verifying that the SRS settings as seen in the "Reporting Services Configuration" screen were OK, setting permissions on the .Net framework directory, and probably a lot more, it came down to one thing:
The proxy server. We deploy (force) proxy server use via GPO. The proxy pac file sends local stuff over the local network and remote stuff through the proxy server. The SCOM-Reporting install wizard was checking to make sure SRS was working, by going to http://SQLSERVERNAME:80/reports. I'd checked via IE that http://localhost/reports and http://SQLSERVERNAME/reports worked fine. Apparently the :80 threw off the proxy settings and a 'proxy requires authentication' message showed up in the MOMREporting.LOG file stored in %TEMP%.
So I added my user account to the proxy exclusion group and logged back in. This time the wizard sailed through, took the credentials for the data warehouse and data reader accounts, then promptly died again. More digging, and this time I came up a 'UnableToGetUserNameFromManagementServerSDKAccount' error. This googled nicely into a MS KB article suggesting it was a disjointed namespace issue and listed a hotfix to work around it. Since I know I didn't have a disjointed namespace I tried again, only this time when it asked what my management server was instead of putting in the FQDN (e.g., mscom.ad.domain.com) I just put in 'mscom' (the hostname) by itself.
The wizard ran to completion and now it's all set up. YAY!
I've played with mscom a bit and see that it has a fairly steep learning curve, but if the install was this hard to finally get right... This is probably going to result in more posts...
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