The Adventures of Systems Boy!
The first of what looks to be a great series on why computers suck is up on Ars today:
"All computers suck. It's just you find one that sucks in a way you can deal with." Is that really what developers want?
Not only is this awesome, but it's also proof that John C. Welch can write without saying fuck every fifth word.
Yay.
I'm poking around in Mavericks and found cool new functionality in Quicklook. If you're using Quicklook to view an image, by default it will show you the entire image. If the image is larger than will fit on your screen, it will show you a scaled version.
But, in Mavericks, if you press the Option key after Quicklook has opened, the larger images will zoom in to display at the full resolution of the image.
I've all but stopped using iPhoto to manage my images. It's so slow I can't even arrange folders in the sidebar. If an app dedicated to organization is unorganizable, well, I guess I don't really much see the point.
The thing is, there's no good reason for this slowness. I don't have that many photos, my hardware is reasonably good, and I've stayed up to date on the software side of things. So WTF?
Today I did some poking around and I was able to make iPhoto perform up to par again, after all these years, which is to say it's now working reasonably well. It's at least usable again.
Seems there was a bad cache file, of all things.
My bad cache file was located by:
1. Showing the contents of the iPhoto Library — located in ~/Pictures — by right-clicking and choosing "Show Package Contents..."
2. Deleting the folder called "Project Cache" which contained a long-forgotten iPhoto book project I was testing.
Since doing this iPhoto has been well behaved, but it's also good to know that there is also a cache store located here:
~/Library/Containers/com.apple.iPhoto
This is pretty great. Unfortunately, I've since worked around iPhoto's deficiencies by finding other tools for managing my images. But that's a story for another time.
Whither iWork? ★
Nigel Warren:
The fact that iWork on the Mac has lost functionality isn’t because Apple is blind to power users. It’s because they’re willing to make a short-term sacrifice in functionality so that they can create a foundation that is equal across the Mac, iOS, and web versions. It will take time to bring these new versions of iWork up to parity with what the Mac used to have. In the meantime all platforms have to live with the lowest common denominator.
This is what I think, too. Doesn’t make it any easier to stomach if you relied on features that have gone away though. And let’s see how long “short-term” is.
So, rather than add the necessary features to the iOS version of iWork, Apple chose to remove those features from the OS X version in order to bring the apps to parity. This seems completely backwards.
Moreover, this doesn't seem advantageous to the consumer at all. Who's happy about this? Is anyone saying, "Hooray! Finally the Mac version of iWork is just as crappy as the one on my iPhone!"
Somehow I doubt it.
Simplifying apps can make them better; removing features does not necessarily achieve this goal, however. But that seems to be the trend at Apple: remove features in the name of simplicity. Unfortunately, I don't see things getting any easier to use; UIs across most apps and functions in Apple's software have not, overall, gotten better despite the constant removal of features from everything from the Airport Utility to Final Cut Pro. They're now both less usable and less functional, because the focus is all wrong.
Apple's focus should be on making difficult things easier to do, not on making difficult things impossible to do.
I've been having a serious problem with, of all things, my Time Machine backups, which is a huge problem as my computer dies a slow, painful death and I wait for the imminent MacBook Pro hardware release. Since replacing my internal hard drive, Time Machine had seemingly decided to perform only full backups. For me, a full backup is a few hundred gigs, so every backup was taking several hours to perform.
There is a terrific website that details nearly every problem you can have with Time Machine, as well as solutions for these problems. It's official title is Apple OS X and Time Machine Tips, but everyone just calls it pondini.org. It is the resource for your Time Machine troubles.
I tried pretty much every fix listed on that site and nothing worked.
After watching Time Machine roll over for the umpteenth time, however, I began to notice a pattern. For one, each time the backup began anew, the amount of data to back up was the same. In addition to this, it was not the full amount of my combined multi-volume backup. After poking about a bit with the ever handy tmutil command, I began to suspect that the trouble might lie not with Time Machine itself, but rather with one of the data volumes I was attempting to back up.
So I started looking at my Work volume. This is the big ATA drive that holds the bulk of my data, while my system resides on a separate SSD. The Work volume was also the one that had recently died and been backed up. One thing I noticed about it was that it appeared to have ACLs and Extended Attributes on it. More importantly, some of those Extended Attributes appeared to be specific to Time Machine.
computername:~ username$ xattr /Volumes/Work/
com.apple.FinderInfo
com.apple.backupd.SnapshotVolumeFSEventStoreUUID
com.apple.backupd.SnapshotVolumeLastFSEventID
com.apple.backupd.SnapshotVolumeUUID
com.apple.backupd.VolumeBytesUsed
com.apple.backupd.VolumeIsCaseSensitive
com.apple.metadata:_kTimeMachineNewestSnapshot
com.apple.metadata:_kTimeMachineOldestSnapshotSo I decided to turn off ACLs and also to remove the Extended Attributes.
computername:~ username$ sudo chmod -RN /Volumes/Work
computername:~ username$ for attr in `xattr /Volumes/Work`; do sudo xattr -d $attr /Volumes/Work; doneI also found a terrific web page that described the exact same problem I was having, and how they fixed it using this exact same method. That site filled in a few blanks for me, namely how to remove the Extended Attributes. So thanks to expat.dyndns.org for the clear, well written article.
Since removing the Extended Attributes and ACLs from my Work volume, backups have been working properly — which is to say incrementally — once again.
My computer is still dying. But at least when it does I'll have a current backup.