Saturday, October 25, 2003
iTerm: Tabbed Terminal For Recovering KDE junkies
One of the things I missed most when I switched from KDE to OS X was a good terminal program. iTerm seems like an excellent replacement. Its got tabs for all those unix junkies, who, like me, have about 10-20 sessions going to multiple servers at once. Having 10-20 windows up is a massive pain, even with expose to sort things out for you. Its so much easier to have tabs running along the top.
Other nice features include: color changes on the tab when text in the terminal has changed, transparency (am I the only one that watches movies through his terminal window while baby sitting a server upgrade?), quick command keys to launch profiles (like log into the firewal when i hit command shift f).
iTerm is yet another shining example of the beautiful software that can come out of the open source world. It has now joined jEdit on my must have open source list.
Other nice features include: color changes on the tab when text in the terminal has changed, transparency (am I the only one that watches movies through his terminal window while baby sitting a server upgrade?), quick command keys to launch profiles (like log into the firewal when i hit command shift f).
iTerm is yet another shining example of the beautiful software that can come out of the open source world. It has now joined jEdit on my must have open source list.
What Did You Do Last Friday Night?
Best quote over heard last night while standing in line to snag a copy of OS X 10.3:
I've been using os x 10.3 for 22 hours and 3 minutes now and I gotta say wow.
My upgrade went something like this: Used rsync to sync my entire drive to one of my linux boxes stuffed full of disks (doesn't everyone have 500gigs of disk stuffed into a machine in their basement?); Reformatted my drive with the journalized fs; Installed os 10.3 (it took me about 40 minutes, still can't touch my Mandrake install in under 5 minutes but still take less time then my last XP install); Booted up and played with the new features; Logged in a dummy user; Rsynced my home directory back to my laptop; Logged back in as myself; Reinstalled any apps that wouldn't copy correctly from my my rsync backup. Overall very painless.
What impresses me most is not the fun new eye candy (although the switch user animation is slick), is not the new expose feature (which is darn tootin cool), and it is not the new finder interface; its the massive speed improvement. None of the reviews I've read so far seem to even mention this. Maybe people use their macs different then I do but damn the difference is noticeable. Time to mount nfs drive: faster then i could blink. How long did it take before? about 10 seconds. Time for safari to load: 1 second (only 1 dock icon bounce), time for address book to load: not even one dock bounce (it was up before my track pad had lost even a calorie of heat from my departing finger tip. I have only gotten then little spinning ball a few times since I put 10.3 on my laptop. For a 867mhz laptop it makes my 2.2ghz intel box look like a 486-66. I did format my drive (I wanted the journalized fs and I was due for a clean up anyway.) but I restored my entire home directory (20gigs worth) and most of my applications (had to reinstall photoshop, office and quicken due to crappy backups). Maybe things will slow down after a bit.
Now for my gripes:
I really can't think of anything else that really bothers me enough to write about. Overall I am extremely impressed by 10.3 and have to give mucho cudos to the crew at Apple. The upgrade was definitely worth the $130 and thats coming from a staunch supporter of the opensource world.
I haven't had a chance to play with Xcode yet but I'll try to follow up once I get a feel for it. (I wasn't impressed by its predecessor).
-Tim
"When I used to be hip, on a Friday night I'd be in line to get into a trendy club. Now? Its a Friday night and I'm going to the Apple Store."
I've been using os x 10.3 for 22 hours and 3 minutes now and I gotta say wow.
My upgrade went something like this: Used rsync to sync my entire drive to one of my linux boxes stuffed full of disks (doesn't everyone have 500gigs of disk stuffed into a machine in their basement?); Reformatted my drive with the journalized fs; Installed os 10.3 (it took me about 40 minutes, still can't touch my Mandrake install in under 5 minutes but still take less time then my last XP install); Booted up and played with the new features; Logged in a dummy user; Rsynced my home directory back to my laptop; Logged back in as myself; Reinstalled any apps that wouldn't copy correctly from my my rsync backup. Overall very painless.
What impresses me most is not the fun new eye candy (although the switch user animation is slick), is not the new expose feature (which is darn tootin cool), and it is not the new finder interface; its the massive speed improvement. None of the reviews I've read so far seem to even mention this. Maybe people use their macs different then I do but damn the difference is noticeable. Time to mount nfs drive: faster then i could blink. How long did it take before? about 10 seconds. Time for safari to load: 1 second (only 1 dock icon bounce), time for address book to load: not even one dock bounce (it was up before my track pad had lost even a calorie of heat from my departing finger tip. I have only gotten then little spinning ball a few times since I put 10.3 on my laptop. For a 867mhz laptop it makes my 2.2ghz intel box look like a 486-66. I did format my drive (I wanted the journalized fs and I was due for a clean up anyway.) but I restored my entire home directory (20gigs worth) and most of my applications (had to reinstall photoshop, office and quicken due to crappy backups). Maybe things will slow down after a bit.
Now for my gripes:
- I had to retrain my spam filters in Mail. I had completely forgotten what its like to read my email without spam filters in place. Talk about not realizing what you had till its gone. If I have to read one more message about enlargement I am going to lose it.
- You can't (or atleast I haven't figured out howto) set FileVault to only encrypt certain directories in your home directory. I really don't think I need to encrypt my 10gigs of mp3's (seeing as I do own all of said music and have nothing to hide from our friends at the riaa).
- The switch user feature doesn't let you make the list in the menu bar shorter (like let you display usernames instead of full names, or even icons instead of names). I have a 15" powerbook and my name isn't that long so the dent in menubar space isn't that bad but it would be a massive pain if you had a 12" and a long name. This isn't much of a gripe, but I'm really fishing for stuff to bitch about.
I really can't think of anything else that really bothers me enough to write about. Overall I am extremely impressed by 10.3 and have to give mucho cudos to the crew at Apple. The upgrade was definitely worth the $130 and thats coming from a staunch supporter of the opensource world.
I haven't had a chance to play with Xcode yet but I'll try to follow up once I get a feel for it. (I wasn't impressed by its predecessor).
-Tim
Thursday, October 23, 2003
Only 1 Day Left till 10.3
While waiting for the drive on my laptop to backup (yes i'm going to clean format when i install panther) I stumbled across a funny review of 10.3 from nytimes. My favorite quote from the article:
FileVault uses an encoding scheme so thorough, Apple says, that a password-guessing computer would need 149 trillion years to break it. Just enough time for Apple to reach Mac OS X 11.
