OK, a little weirdness.

I’ve been working on making some changes to the design of the site — you’ve probably noticed.  There’s still some dust to kick around, so expect to see changes.

However, as I’ve been posting tonight, the interface has been taking soooooo loooooong.  I started investigating, and in looking at top on the MacMini, I would see one of the httpd threads going close to and above 50% of the CPU.  Fifty percent!

I don’t get it, but at least some httpd requests are generating a ton of CPU utilization.  I dunno if that’s telling me the MacMini is underpowered, although I’m inclined to think that’s not the case.  It used to act just fine, and this seems to be a recent thing.

Stay tuned — I think there’ll be more on this story!

A week or two ago, I was lamenting the lack of ssh on the D-Link NAS (DSM-G600) I bought last year. I wanted badly to use rsync and its cool ssh interface to sync up the archive from the Quad to the little NAS. Well, as I was on the verge of ripping the 400Gb drive from the NAS and installing it in a external enclosure for use with the Quad, a solution dawned on me.

The NAS is surely just being mounted by Tiger on the Quad, so undoubtedly there was a way to do that from the command line, and then have rsync access it just like it was a local drive. After a little searching on Google, I found the command needed to mount the little NAS:

mount_smbfs – W {workgroup_name} //{user}@{NAS_device}/{remote_share} {local_mountpoint}

This has allowed me to pull of an rsync from the Quad to the NAS:

/usr/bin/rsync –progress –stats –recursive –times -og –delete –size-only {local_source} {NAS_target}

What coolness is that!

Yesterday brought the long-awaited announcement of the new Apple MacBook Pro laptop — the 17″ version.  However, there was no mention of the long rumored iBook replacement.

This new MacBook Pro is a beast, and really seems like a great box for doing photoediting.  The screen resolution is the same as my 20″ monitor on the Quad.  Verra nice!  Add to that an Intel DuoCore, 1Gb of RAM and 120Gb HDD, and you’re talking a spiffy piece of hardware.  One inch thick and weighing about 6.8 pounds, the beast is expensive (retail is $2799), but it is oh-so-capable!

Still, I’ll wait for the iBook replacement.  I think the 13.3″ screen (rumored size) will suit me better, and would be better for lugging around.  Maybe soon……

In doing a little looking around at putting a DNS server here in the house, I started finding some info that seems to have revealed part of the root-cause of the (apparent) DNS problems I was having a month or so ago.

In a nutshell, browsing in Apple-land requires a lot of DNS calls.  And they ain’t cached.

On macosxhints, I found an article that describes this dilemma, and details what seems like a decent solution.

So tonight, I’ll be goofing on the Quad and trying to speed up my web experience.  Woo-hoo!

After talking with Casey today, I got inspired to look into rsync for some simple data mirroring of the photo archive.  Last year, I bought a dLink GSM-600 NAS for just that purpose.  It had Gig-E, albeit without jumbo packet support, and could take any ol’ PATA drive.  Cool.

So, I started looking at rsync, and trying to figure out how to get data to the NAS from the command line, thinking I would set up a cron job.  Well, come to figure out that the dLink doesn’t seem to support anything other than ftp from the command line.  Booooo.

That leaves me with dragging and dropping files onto the NAS until I can find a different solution.  I could pen a massive ftp script, maybe using rsync to figure out what’s changed and feeding that into ftp.  That’s not the greatest of ideas, although it would be automated and out of my hair.

Two hardware solutions present themselves.  One is a real NAS, with real Gig-E with jumbo packet support or perhaps connected via Firewire800 to the Quad.  The other is stick another SATA drive in the Quad, and just mirror the good stuff over to it.  I kinda like the idea of having RAID available, and while that’s doable in the Quad with a little extra hardware, having it external means that I can take it on the road if I need to.

However, NAS with RAID ain’t cheap.  It could be $600 easy for just the box, and then add some hard drives.  Slapping a SATA drive in the Quad is cheap insurance, and that may be the best short term answer, along with rsync to coordinate the copies.  The current photo archive size is 120Gb, and I’m sure I can get a 250Gb drive for under $100, which would house it with loads of growth potential.

Data storage and retrieval will be the bane of my existence!  🙂

Yesterday’s announcement that Apple had released a software product, Boot Camp, that would allow Windows XP to be loaded and run as a dual-boot component of a Intel-based Mac was amazing.  It wasn’t shocking though.

The experimenting community had figured out to put XP on a MacIntel a month or so ago — there was even a contest with a $14k prize to the first person to do it.  That created a stir, especially after the benchmarks came out that the MacIntel hardware was some of the fastest for running XP.

Why wouldn’t Apple try to capitalize on that?

So, the software is a public beta now, but will be included with the next major rev of OS X (code named Leopard), and while Apple will eventually support this piece, they will not take on supporting the XP that would be loaded on their hardware.  Fair enough.

Who wins here?  Well, everyone, I think. 

I was nervous about moving to Mac, as I had some Windows-only software that slowed my migration.  No more!  Just dual boot, and you’re ready, and without the performance penalties that Microsoft’s Virtual PC gives.  I like Virtual PC, and I run it on the Quad as I have plenty of leftover headroom, but I can’t imagine running that on a MacMini or some other G4 powered machine.  This solution helps solve that problem — admittedly, you have to have MacIntel hardware before this is an advantage.

And, if you’re Microsoft, you sell more copies of XP.  That’s gotta please Redmond, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they were at least peripherally involved in helping this code come to life.

Lastly, the gamers will love it.  Esoteric hardware running really fast XP have been their thing, and this solution gives them the best of both worlds.  XP for gaming, and Mac OS X for everything else.

Now, I’ve been reading where some of the Mac folks think it’s the end of the world as we know it.  I don’t think I agree.  I think this opens up a lot of choices for MacIntel owners, and makes the delineation between the OS’s on this class of hardware a little less onerous.  Pick up any box on the software shelf, and you can run it.  Want best of breed software for a given application?  Pick it up and run it, no matter what OS it requires.  Want something that’s tuned a little better for one OS or the other?  Just box the box, and it’ll likely work.  That’s cool.

For me, and lots of other Photoshop users, this is a godsend.  Photoshop won’t be available in a Universal Binary until next year, and Photoshop CS2 under Rosetta is supposedly pretty bad.  In my case, that means I could pick up a MacBook Pro laptop, run both OS’s, and dual boot over to XP to run my old copy of Photoshop CS at a blazing speed until Adobe comes up with the Universal Binary version of Photoshop.  And for all those narrowly-focused photography tools that only run on Windows, now I can have them on that machine too.

I can see no downside to this.  After all, it’s not about OS religion, it’s about having the tools available to do the job at hand.  Boot Camp is like someone giving you another tool chest full of tools for some of those unique situations where you need them.  That’s a winner in my book!

Last week, there was an article in one of my dailies about recovering space on your Mac by ridding the machine of unwanted/unneeded/unused stuff.  The article is part of Metrobilly, and looks very promising.

The piece at Metrobilly pointed me to a terrific screen saver from Japan, and far better than anything else I’m running.  That screen saver is at Futurismo Zugakousaku, and is well worth bringing down.

It also pointed me to a disk mapping utility that looks dynamite.  Terribly graphical, and very intuitive, Disk Inventory X is helping me spot the hogs on the drive, and deal with them.  I mean, I’ve had this new machine since December, and I’ve already consumed 440Gb of the 500Gb primary drive.  Every once in a while, I think it’d be good to put a second drive in there, but it’s much more economical to just clean up what I have!  🙂