We're traveling to Spain and Ireland for three weeks. I'm bringing the netbook, not the 17" MacBook Pro, because it's small and light. It doesn't have a DVD player and I'd like to bring some DVDs to watch. I could either spend about $80 on an external DVD player, or I could rip the DVDs beforehand.

I've ripped a few DVDs with Handbrake, an open source, cross-platform video transcoder, which seems to do a good job. I'm playing them in the cross-platform VLC player, which released version 1.0.0 yesterday, after almost 8 years of development.

Google finally released the much-anticipated Chrome preview for Mac and Linux yesterday. I've tried it on my OS 10.5 MacBook and my Ubuntu Jaunty Netbook Remix netbook.

Chrome works fairly well, so far. It seems slow at resolving hostnames, but otherwise downloads pages quickly. Rendering speed is good. Gmail comes up in an amazingly short time, as in Windows Chrome. It uses less CPU than Safari or Camino.

Favicons are not showing up in tabs on Mac. Fonts are not antialiased on Linux.

As a user, I'm happy to see that there is real competition between the browsers after the stagnation in the first half of this decade, when IE6 ruled. As a web developer, it's a pain to have so many browsers to test.

I mentioned CrossLoop before, as a tool for remotely helping someone out. It uses VNC to share desktops.

The last time I looked, it was Windows only. Now there's a Mac client too.

I had to use it to help my father out in Dublin. Somehow he had managed to delete both Adobe Reader and Adobe Flash—I haven't figured out how.

It was painful, painful, painful. The connection was dropped repeatedly and the link couldn't begin to keep up with the amount of graphical data being transferred. Even though CrossLoop reduces the color depth, actions like switching tabs in Firefox cause huge amounts of data to be sent. I couldn't tell why the connection was being dropped. There are so many places where things could go wrong: my client, my connection, the CrossLoop server, his connection, his client, some random router.

All in all, it took about 90 minutes, but it would likely have been even longer and more confusing without a shared desktop.

I tried Safari 4 on my MacBook back in February when it first came out in beta. It crashed immediately, every time, so I uninstalled it.

I upgraded to OS X 10.5.7 earlier in the week and new Safari bits were available, so it seemed like a good time to retry it. After all, it had been faster than any other browser on my Vista box at work.

Again, it crashed immediately. This time, however, I took a closer look at the details of the error report that was being sent to Apple. A little Googling suggested that the Glims plugin was at fault. Indeed it was. I replaced beta 8 from September 2008 with the new beta 16, and it's working again. Glims adds search engines, thumbnails in search results, favicons in tabs, etc., so it's useful.

I haven't used Safari 4 much yet on the Mac, but it seems like an improvement.

I ported Vim to Win64 but I don't have a convenient Win64 system to test it on.

I decided to install the Win64 build of the Windows 7 RC on VirtualBox, which has supported 64-bit guest operating systems since version 2.0.

It worked without problems on my MacBook Pro. I used VirtualBox's Virtual Media Manager to mount the Windows 7 ISO and installed from that. See also the handy guide. (Why does Windows 7 offer a choice of upgrading from a previous version of Windows on a virgin disk?) After completing the installation of the operating system, I installed the Guest Additions for mouse pointer integration and other goodies.

As always with VirtualBox VMs on my MacBook, I had to fix the Network settings to work over WiFi. When the VM is turned off, go to Settings, choose the Network tab. Change “Attached to” from “NAT” to “Bridged Adapter” and “Name” from “en0: Ethernet” to “en1: AirPort”. Tip: to get a right-click without a mouse, place two fingers on the trackpad and click the trackpad button, or Shift+F10.

I tried installing the Win64 build of Win 7 on my Win32 Vista desktop box at work. The host system bluescreened within seconds of starting the installer! I filed ticket 3963.

I had inadvertently installed the Win32 build first on my work system. That worked fine. It also seemed to have snappy disk I/O. When I unzipped the Win64 Vim binaries (not having realized yet that I had the Win32 Win 7), it was slower than unzipping in the host operating system, but not unreasonably so. On my MacBook, the details pane from the Win 7 zip extractor said that it was running at a mere 260KB per second, which is pitiful. It certainly wasn't that slow when installing the OS onto the virtual disk.

I blogged before that I had used Exact Audio Copy to rip most of my CD collection to the lossless FLAC format. I haven't ripped any more CDs since then, as the old Windows laptop that I was using had severe problems.

We went to the Columbia City Beatwalk on Friday night. I liked the Correo Aereo duo so much that I bought their CD.

It was time to figure out how to rip a CD to FLAC on the Mac. I found some hints that it was possible to run Exact Audio Copy in a virtual machine or under Wine, but neither choice appealed to me.

One guide recommended xACT over Max on the grounds that xACT will tell you exactly where an error occurs on a CD, should one occur, while Max only gives a percent encoded successfully. What you do if an error occurs was not described.

I tried xACT first. It's a thin wrapper around various command-line utilities. The guide details a clunky process to rip a CD to FLAC.

Then I tried Max and I was greatly impressed. The UI is polished for an open-source app. It rips to WAV, then encodes to multiple formats if you want. It can also transcode over 20 audio formats. Max is multithreaded: it can be encoding a WAV from one track to FLAC and MP3 simultaneously, while ripping the next track from the CD. Exact Audio Copy rips a track to WAV, then encodes to FLAC, without overlapping. Net result is that Max rips a CD about four times faster than EAC. A lot has to do with the hardware. My five-year-old Windows laptop was not high-end even when brand new. My two-year-old Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro was top of the line.

I no longer have to run a Python script to convert all the FLACs to MP3s. Max puts both sets of files in the same folder, so I had to write a small script to split them into two separate trees. Otherwise, I'm very happy with Max.

Many of the screenshots that show up on my blog were captured with ImageWell, a little Mac app with resizing, uploading, and rudimentary image editing functionality. It used to be freeware. Now it costs $20 after the trial period runs out.

InstantShot! is a menu bar app that does a good job of taking screenshots, but that's all it does.

ChocoFlop, which I've only just discovered, seems like the best of the free image editors for the Mac. The rest are pretty bad. Nothing as good as Paint.NET on Windows.

GIMP on OS X has finally become more or less usable, but that's heavyweight.

I wrote yesterday about NTFS-3G because I was backing my MacBook to an external NTFS drive. I was backing up because I wanted to de-partition my Mac.

When I upgraded my MacBook to a bigger drive, more RAM, and OS X 10.5, I partitioned the drive. I created two 25GB partitions with the intention of putting Windows and Linux on them with BootCamp. It turns out that BootCamp doesn't like that. It wants the system drive to have only one partition, which it would shrink. I never bothered to go any further.

The disk has been filling up recently and I wanted the extra space back, to extend my primary HFS+ partition by 50GB. I found a guide to nondestructively resizing volumes with the command-line diskutil tool.

With some trepidation, I set out to reclaim the end of my drive. Happily, it turned out to be both quick and painless.

Here's the old disk layout:

georger@georger-macbook:~$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *298.1 Gi   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         200.0 Mi   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS GeorgeR Mac             250.0 Gi   disk0s2
   3:       Microsoft Basic Data WINDOWS                 25.0 Gi    disk0s3
   4:       Microsoft Basic Data LINUX                   22.8 Gi    disk0s4

First, I merged the two FAT32 partitions into one HFS+ partition:

georger@georger-macbook:~$ sudo diskutil mergePartitions \
    "Journaled HFS+" End disk0s3 disk0s4
The chosen disk does not support resizing, do you wish to format instead? (y/N) y
Merging partitions into a new partition
     Start partition: disk0s3 WINDOWS
     Finish partition: disk0s4 LINUX
Started erase after partitioning on disk disk0s3
Erasing
Mounting disk
[ + 0%..10%..20%..30%..40%..50%..60%..70%..80%..90%..100% ]
Finished erase after partitioning on disk disk0s3 End
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *298.1 Gi   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         200.0 Mi   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS GeorgeR Mac             250.0 Gi   disk0s2
   3:                  Apple_HFS End                     47.6 Gi    disk0s3

Then, I merged the two HFS+ partitions:

georger@georger-macbook:~$ sudo diskutil mergePartitions \
    "Journaled HFS+" End disk0s2 disk0s3
Merging partitions into a new partition
     Start partition: disk0s2 GeorgeR Mac
     Finish partition: disk0s3 End
Attempting resize
Changing filesystem size on disk 'disk0s2'...
Attempting to change filesystem size from 268435456000 to 319728959488 bytes
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *298.1 Gi   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         200.0 Mi   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS GeorgeR Mac             297.8 Gi   disk0s2

And everything is good:

georger@georger-macbook:~$ df
Filesystem    512-blocks      Used     Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/disk0s2   624470624 508168048 115790576    81%    /

Disclaimer: back your disk up and read the diskutil man page very carefully before using: one misstep could ruin the contents of your disk.

After I started running Linux and then Mac OS X, in addition to Windows, I started on a quest to find the universal filesystem. I had multiboot systems and external drives where I wanted to to be able to read and write disks under multiple operating systems.

The obvious choice is FAT32, the ubiquitous, lowest-common denominator filesystem. FAT32 is supported out-of-the-box by all major operating systems, digital cameras, and PDAs, so that's a huge advantage. FAT32 also has major shortcomings:

• Maximum file size is 4GB. I have ISOs, MPEGs, and other large files exceeding this limit.
• Fragmentation happens too easily.
• Timestamps: accurate only to 2-second resolution. No notion of timezones or UTC.
• Journaling: none. Preferred for robustness.
• ACLs or Permissions. Nothing beyond R/W.

I experimented with ext3 (and its non-journaling sibling, ext2) on Windows and later on the Mac. On Windows, ext2fs works well and I used it happily for several months on a machine dualbooting XP and Ubuntu. It did not work well with Vista initially, though that seems to have been fixed since.

My experiences on the Mac were bad: ext2fsx caused some kernel panics, which was enough for me to abandon it.

There was no free solution for reading and writing Mac HFS+ disks under Linux and Windows the last time that I checked.

Both Linux and Macs natively support mounting NTFS disks read-only. The NTFS-3G project allows Linux to write to NTFS disks, and Mac NTFS-3G does likewise for Macs. I've never had a problem with NTFS-3G and it's worked flawlessly under Linux and Mac for me.

Apple launched the public Safari 4 beta today.

It runs beautifully on Vista and it's the fastest browser that I've seen, noticeably faster than Chrome. Everything that I tried worked fairly well; I saw only a few minor glitches.

I installed it on my MacBook at home this evening. It crashes at startup every time that I attempt to run it. Fortunately, it comes with an uninstaller so that I could revert to Safari 3.21.

Back to Opera for now.

For several years, Firefox has been my default browser. Firefox's extensions have always been its paramount feature for me, but its performance and developer tools came close. I'm very happy with it, for the most part.

The one thing that makes me unhappy is Firefox 3's CPU consumption. Time and again, I find it running at close to full utilization of one CPU core on my MacBook Pro. The tipoff is usually the warmth of the metal case. Killing the Gmail tab tends to help, but not enough. In Firefox 2, the worst problem was the memory leaks. Within hours, it would have chewed up several hundred megabytes. Memory usage is better in FF3, but I still have to shut it down too often for my liking, especially after using Firebug for a while.

In the last couple of months, I've been trying other browsers on my MacBook at home. Camino and Safari have had their chances, but they run too hot over time. I'll be sure to give Chrome a shot when it's released for the Mac—I quite like it on Windows.

Opera is what I've been using for the last few weeks. It runs the coolest of any of the browsers that I've tried. It's snappy enough. The JavaScript debugger is decent, and far better than Chrome's or Safari's. I'd prefer better integration with Google Reader, as I have no intention of switching RSS readers.

I've been very happy with my MacBook Pro. It's my primary home machine, sitting on the living room coffee table, and getting far more use than the desktop system in my office upstairs.

But it rarely leaves the house. It's big–a 17" screen–and it's heavy. I seldom carry it anywhere and I hardly ever bring it to a coffee shop.

I bought myself a netbook last month, an Asus Eee 1000H: 10" screen, 1024x600, 1.6GHz dual core Atom, 1GB RAM, 160GB hard disk, 3lbs, $479. Look at how much bigger the MacBook is in the photo! For reference, the Eee 1000H is the same size as a magazine. It's small enough and light enough that I take it with me every day, and it's been inside many a coffee shop.

The Eee came with Windows XP Home. I immediately repartitioned it and put Ubuntu Eee on the second partition. I don't think I've booted back into Windows after the first few days. All the devices (webcam, sound) and apps (Skype, Flash) work and I have all the Ubuntu goodness, optimized for this form factor, instead of a seven-year-old operating system.

The keyboard is adequate for my slender hands, though I would not care to do a lot of writing on it. The main problem that I continue to have with it is the placement of the right-hand Shift key, to the right of the Up-arrow key. My touch-typing fingers expect to find Shift beside the /, dammit.

The Elantech trackpad drove me nuts initially. Under both XP and Ubuntu Eee, it's configured with all kinds of multitouch gestures. Far too often, I inadvertently clicked or selected merely by hovering over the trackpad while typing. With some pain (especially on Ubuntu), I figured out how to turn all that crap off, so that it merely moves the mouse around and the right edge scrolls.

The screen is a little too small at 1024x600. The Netbook Remix interface replaces the GNOME desktop with a custom launcher. Each window runs maximized by default with minimal trimmings.

For a low-power machine, it's surprisingly fast. The Atom has two cores, so even if one is maxed out, the other one keeps the machine responsive. 1GB has been sufficient so far, but I'll probably get a 2GB stick because RAM is cheap.

I'm very pleased with the Eee. It nicely complements my MacBook.

Last week, I gave my 2007 MacBook Pro laptop a makeover before upgrading to Leopard, aka OS X 10.5.

A couple of months ago, I bought 4GB RAM for less than $100, to replace the 2GB that it came with.

I wanted to upgrade the drive too, as I repeatedly came close to filling the original 160GB drive. It was no problem to get a 5400 RPM drive that had more than 300GB, but the 7200 RPM notebook drives were topping out at 200GB. Two weeks, I spotted a Western Digital Scorpio Black 320GB 7200 RPM SATA drive on NewEgg for $180. Sold!

I installed it the night it arrived, and it was quite the ordeal. I followed the iFixit instructions and it took me a solid hour to disassemble the case, replace the drive, and close it all back up. There are eight pages of photos and more than 30 tiny, fiddly screws to deal with. I also needed two special screwdrivers, a really small Phillips head and a Torx T6. The similar ExtremeTech instructions conclude by telling you how to format the new drive with Disk Utility from the OS installer DVD; I also used Disk Utility to partition the drive.

By comparison, I also bought a 250GB IDE drive for my old Compaq laptop at the same time. (That machine's problems turned out to be bad sectors on the original drive.) Only two screws have to be removed to get the drive cage out, and another four to take the drive out of the cage. Five minutes work.

My new Mac drive is very favorably reviewed by Tech Report, which gives it the Editor's Choice award. It seems faster, but I didn't bother to benchmark the old drive. That drive is now sitting in a USB enclosure, and will do very nicely for Time Machine backups.

Tomas Restrepo wrote a post about sharing dotfiles between Windows and Ubuntu, specifically about sharing .vimrc (Linux) and _vimrc (Windows) and the .vim (Linux) and vimfiles (Windows) directories.

I have a different solution. On Windows, my C:\AutoExec.bat includes:

set HOME=C:\gvr
set VIM=C:\Vim
set VIMDIR=%VIM%\vim71
set EDITOR=%VIMDIR%\gvim.exe
set PATH=%PATH%;C:\Win32app;C:\GnuWin32\bin;C:\UnxUtils;C:\SysInternals;C:\Python25\Scripts

%HOME% (C:\gvr) contains _vimrc, vimfiles, and other stuff accumulated over many years. This directory is stored in a personal Subversion repository at DevjaVu. All my Vim files are stored with Unix LF endings, not Windows CR-LFs, so that they'll work on my Mac OS X and Linux boxen. I play some games with if has("win32") and if has('gui_macvim') to ensure that my _vimrc works cross-platform.

On my *nix boxes, the gvr folder lives under my home directory at ~/gvr, and ~/.vimrc and ~/.vim are symlinks:

$ ln -s ~/gvr/_vimrc ~/.vimrc
$ ln -s ~/gvr/vimfiles/ ~/.vim

In addition, the dotfiles that I keep in SVN are stored locally in ~/gvr/dotfiles without a leading period in their names, which makes them easy to see:

$ ln -s ~/gvr/dotfiles/bashrc ~/.bashrc

This arrangement works well for me.

I ordered a 17" Mac Book Pro on Friday night. It shipped from Shanghai on Monday and arrived at work this morning. Scha-weet! And spendy.

I've been busy ramping up all day. I estimate that my total lifetime usage of Macs was about one day before today. I definitely have some new habits to learn.

So far, I've installed Mac Vim, Firefox (browser), Camino (browser), Thunderbird (email), Quicksilver (fast launch utility), Witch (window switcher), AntiRSI (RSI preventer), Adium (multi-protocol chat), Skype (Internet telephony), Remote Desktop Connection (connecting to Windows desktops), StuffIt Expander (for classic archives), and KeePassX (password manager).

Some of these have built-in equivalents of course, but I'm using these for compatibility with my existing Windows and Linux setups and data (e.g., Thunderbird, KeePassX) or because I'm too entrenched to change (Vim).

My laptop scared the crap out of me last night. I came home to find it in a completely unresponsive state: it would not wake up. The hard disk LED was a solid green. I power cycled it and it refused to boot.

It did, however, boot from a Kubuntu Edgy CD, but it did not recognize the hard disk. In desperation, I booted into the BIOS and played with the disk-related menus. That fixed the problem, but I don't know what went wrong, and my faith is shaken in the reliability of this system.

I bought the laptop just over three years ago, shortly before I quit Microsoft, as a replacement for the work laptop that I had been using. It's served me well. I have a reasonably beefy desktop system of the same age, but I almost always use the laptop instead. It's a Compaq Presario X1012QV, with a 1.3GHz Centrino, a WXGA screen, 35GB hard disk, and 1280MB RAM. It had 512MB RAM originally, but I replaced one of the 256MB sticks with a 1GB stick last year, making it more pleasant to use.

For several months now, I've been planning to buy a new Vista-ready laptop this spring, with a Core 2 Duo, ~100GB disk, and 2+GB RAM. I want a 64-bit CPU so that I can occasionally run Win64; e.g., to update the Win64 port of Vim. I'm severely tempted by Apple and expect to end up with some kind of Mac laptop — my first ever Mac. I was hoping to hold out until Mac OSX 10.5 (Leopard) comes out sometime this spring, but the latest rumors say that it's "edging the very limit of the definition of 'Spring' — i.e. mid-June". If the Presario craps out on me again, I'll replace it in short order.

Whether I go with Mac or stick with a PC, I'll continue to run multiple OSes. Kubuntu Linux has been my primary operating system since last June, and I think it's unlikely that Vista will replace it. OSX may well do so.