The Busy Time

Well, it's that time of year again. School is starting. Which leaves us quite busy in the lab, running around, making sure everything looks all purdy, making sure the network and the computers all work, and making sure new users are at least marginally oriented to our way of doing things. Unfortunately, this leaves me little time to post blog articles. In fact, in the short time I've been writing this very article, I've been interupted a grand total of some-odd umpteen times. Yes, it's true. Umpteen.

Anyway, all I really want to say is that I have posts in the pipe: More on the Tiger lab migration, more on antivirus issues, more on my Windows experience. They're coming. Soon. I promise. ('Cause I know you're all just waiting with bated breath.)

Until then, make like a McBLT: keep the hot side hot, and the cool side cool.

I can't believe I just wrote that.

Okay; got's to run.

systemsboy

The Dark Side Part 1: First Impressions

I've been using computers seriously now for eight years. I first started in grad school, where I studied Electronc Arts, and have been going strong ever since. The whole time I've worked on nothing but the Macintosh operating system. I've even made a career of the Mac, and am currently a Mac SysAdmin.

Two days ago, my Dell laptop arrived.

My decision to buy a non-Macintosh computer was a practical one: I want to learn. Specifically, I want to learn other operating systems, particularly Windows and certain flavors of Linux that will (currently) only run on non-Apple hardware. I'm tired of living with blinders on. As a SysAdmin, I feel compelled to see what lives on the other side of the computing street.

So, after two days of Dell ownership, I wanted to record my initial impressions with the new system.

First off, Windows does, indeed, suck. I'm shocked at how primitive and arcane it is. Doing anything in Windows seems to take twice as many clicks as it does in Mac OS X. Some configuration panels have nested windows that, when opened, close thier parent windows, forcing you to navigate the filesystem to return to the original configuration panel. There are inconsistencies like this throughout the OS that make using it maddening, particularly when you've been working on the Mac OS for so many years. And it's slow and ugly. I've spent much of my time trying to get the look of the GUI somewhat more palatable, and it's gotten better, but it's still nowhere near as attractive as the Mac.

The Dell hardware is also comparitively ugly, but for the most part, my Inspiron 600m seems well built, and has a decent keyboard and a nice monitor. Most of my usabilty troubles come from not being familiar with the key commands for this system. I'm a bit surprised at how sluggish the machine seems comapred to my aging 867MHz PowerBook Titanium, but this may be due to the Dell bloatware that comes preinstalled. We shall see.

Anyway, I'm not going to go into too many details at this point, as I'm still quite the newbie, but I did want to document the out-of-the-box experiences and problems I've had thus far. For the record, the system is a Dell Inspiron 600m, Pentium M 1.6 GHz, with 1.5 GB of RAM and Windows XP Professional pre-installed. Here we go:

1. Firing up the Dell, the first thing that struck me was the immediate sense of paranoia accompanied by the experience. You are instanly greeted with a number of popups warning you to upgrade your OS and your virus and privacy software, and check your firewall settings -- stuff I've only secondarily had to worry about on the Mac because its' either not an issue, or it's well configured in the first place. I find it ironic that the software that's supposed to prevent others from taking over your computer does so much taking over itself. I could hardly use the machine for the first few hours as I was so busy responding to popups and alerts. On the Mac, when you log in for the first time, there's nothing but peace and quiet.

2. I had hoped that updating OS, antivirus and privacy sofware would be fairly easy. It wasn't. (In all fairness, updating third party software is always a pain, even on the Mac.) The first -- the absolute first -- thing I installed was Firefox. I've had instantaneous problems with Explorer on Windows (yes, I have a tiny bit of Windows experience) and even I know not to use it. And getting Firefox was a breeze. In fact, it's almost exactly like it is on Mac. That's nice. Go Firefox! Updating the OS was weird and confusing. I was first alerted to my update needs by one of those little icons in, to use Mac parlance, the toolbar at the lower righthand portion of the screen. Then I was taken to the Microsoft site, where the software began downloading. I was never quite sure what was going on after that, but apparently at some point, the software installed itself, as I was alerted that it had completed and prompted to restart. During the download and install procedure, other popups appeared alerting me to third party updates.

3. Attempting to download and install the third party updates was even more mysterious and vexing. The bundled antivirus software warned me on numerous accounts that I had security holes, but never gave me clear advice on what to do about them. They just said vague things like "Make your computer more secure," which, when clicked, took me to a website where I could download updates for my antivirus software. I have no idea what these updates included. Were there new virus definitions? I don't know. Everything seems obfuscated behind the idea of making things "easy" for the user. The problem is, you never really know what's happening on your machine.

4. Another update I was alerted to was a driver update for my graphics card. This also led me to a website, complete with instructions. The instructions told me to look for the downloaded update in C:\DELL\DRIVERS\r98704, but this folder does not exist on my system. I have no idea where the update was downloaded, nor whether or not it was installed. But the alert has gone away.

5. Making a wireless connection proved challenging as well. It turns out that either Windows or my wireless card is not capable of WEP 128 bit encryption. Once I figured this out (and I will admit, the popup alert from the configuration panel was helpful towards doing so), I was forced to switch my wireless network to WPA. This is actually okay with me. I prefer WPA and had only switched it to WEP because of bugs in Mac OS X Tiger that initally prevented me from using WPA. (These bugs appear to be fixed as of Mac OSX 10.4.2.) The other problem with connecting to the wireless was that Windows and the Dell-bundled software were competing for control over the network card. So at some point, I went to the network configuration panel and there were no wireless netoworks. They had seemingly disappeared. What had actually happened was that the Dell-installed software had taken over the connection. Turning off that software fixed the problem. But this is a big part of the reason why the Mac experience is so much more seamless. You rarely see third party software competing for control over hardware or OS level functionality. It's all handled by the OS.

6. I will say this. There is one feature of my Dell machine that I truly appreciate, and that is the trackpad tap-sensitivity control. This is something that has been absent on the Mac forever. I like using the touchpad for clicking, but on the Mac it is far too sensitive for my style, the result being that I end up clicking when and where I didn't mean to, and causing general mayhem. On my Windows machine, I can configure the tap sensitivity to my liking. And doing so makes tap-clicking very usable. It's nice. And I already miss it on my PowerBook.

So, at this point, all the alerts seem to have subsided, and I'm just trying to learn and acclimate myself to the new machine. Now that everything's updated -- at least to the best of my knowledge -- let's see how it goes. I'll be reporting more on my experiences in the future, particularly when I get to installing Linux, so stay tuned.

Spotlight Revisited

See? Now this is what I'm talking about. Spotlight just doesn't work right. Now, I will admit, I've been using it a bit, and a couple times, over the past couple months, it's actually come in somewhat handy. But today, it lied. And I can prove it.

I was installing the nifty GoogleMaps plugin for Address Book. And I was looking around for the old GoogleMaps install, because, at least in the past, finding files whose names I knew on the filesystem was easier than reading a maunal. Lucky for me, today I got to do both. So, I open a Finder window, navigate to my home directory, and in the little search bubble thingy, I type these exact letters:

googlemaps

Now, I know that the letters "g-o-o-g-l-e-m-a-p-s" exist in the files I'm looking for, because I have the replacements right there in front of me. So when my search does not yield the files I want, I modify the search. In the same window's bubble-search thingy, I type:

BTgooglemaps

And now my files turn up.

Now wait. Doesn't "BTgooglemaps" contain the term "googlemaps"? So, shouldn't searching the latter yield the former? Yes, it should. In fact, if I just search "maps", I get my "BTgooglemaps" in the results, and lots of other crap, but not, for instance, my "com.briantoth.addressbook.googlemaps.plist", which does appear when searching "googlemaps".

This is just... Uh... How you say? Oh, right: Fucked.

If I can't trust my search engine to yield results that I know are there, then its usefulness is severly compromised. The old version of the Finder window search bubble was flawless at this. I used it all the time and it never failed me. And its functionality still exists somewhere in the Finder. We know this, because when we turn Spotlight off, the old functionality resumes. But for some reason, Apple has chosen to completely replace this functionality with a deeply flawed, and not always appropriate, method of searching: Spotlight.

Call me greedy, but I want both. I'll say it again: I want the old Panther-style, find-by-name in the Finder window toolbar search, and then I think I could live with Spotlight everywhere else. Although, in an ideal world, I would have preferences that let me define how each search method works: Finder window find, command-f find, Spotlight find. All these (or at least some of them) could (dare I say should) be configurable via preferences. And that would be sweet.

What we have right now is not sweet. It's a kludge.

Mmmm... ClamXav...

All I can say is, wow.

When I originally downloaded and installed ClamXav, I used it entirely from the command-line. Which is funny, because it's whole reason for being was to lend a GUI hand to the command-line, open source clamav engine. But ClamXav has made immense strides in the short year since its first appearance, and in it's latest incarnation, the GUI has features that totally and completely rock. Namely: Sentry.

Okay, let me back up and explain just what ClamXav is. ClamXav is virus detection software for your Mac, and it's free. That's right, free. Though the author will take donations, which I highly suggest we all go give him, so that he keeps providing this wonderful software. For free. ClamXav is basically a GUI wrapper for the open source clamav virus detection software for other UNIX systems, which has been around for some time now. ClamXav installs that engine, and provides a lovely (well, it's not the most beautiful software, but it's quite functional and easy to understand) GUI frontend that allows you to schdule virus scans, and create watch folders, among other things. One nice thing about ClamXav is that it uses standard UNIX goodness to accomplish its goals. So, for instance, when you set up the scheduler, it's just editing your user crontab. Nice. I might suggest to the author, for multi-user environments, a way to schedule scans via the global crontab as well. For now, if you want to do that, you'll have to edit /etc/crontab yourself.

I must stress here that, despite its free-ness, ClamXav, in my experience, is also the most accurate of the virus scanners. I've tried Norton, Virex, and Sophos, and they all failed to catch viruses that ClamXav was able to find. ClamXav even flagged that mp3 trojan that was floating around awhile ago. Pretty cool that it can catch viruses on a platform that hardly has any, where other software fails. In fact, it's so good, Apple now includes the clamav engine as part of the mail server In Tiger Server. If that's not a ringing endorsement, I don't know what is.

One of my major beefs with ClamXav in the past was the lack of folder watching, which to me seems pretty necessary. But the latest version has what's called a "Sentry" feature, which watches any folder you tell it to, and scans it for viruses whenever something is added to the folder. Nice. Using this to scan your mail can be tricky to set up, but it's do-able for IMAP mail in Panther (but not POP mail), and in Tiger, should be possible for all your mail (including POP, which Tiger now breaks up into individual files, instead of using one big mbox file). So that's great.

The one thing ClamXav lacks -- and will probably always lack -- that Norton AntiVirus has, is the ability to repair viruses. If you've ever had a Word file with a virus -- and God knows I have -- you know they're intractable. And what do you do if you really need that file? ClamXav cannot repair the file for you. Norton can. And that's importatnt.

My method is to use ClamXav for scanning, and NAV for repairs. I never install Norton as it always seems to break something, and is impossible to uninstall. But I keep it handy, just in case I actually do get a virus I need to cure. Hopefully, with ClamXav's new sentry feature, I'll be getting fewer and fewer viruses anyway, so it shouldn't be a big deal. You know, an ounce of prevention, and all that, right?

If you haven't tried ClamXav, I highly recommend you do so. Now. And don't give me any of that "There are no viruses for the Mac" crap. If that's your attitude towards virus protection, then please don't read this article.

Ooops. Too late.

Blogger or Blogsome?

As I mentioned earlier, Blogger's great. With one pretty annoying exception: the glaring omission of categories. Now I have managed to fake categories using del.icio.us and the kindness and ingenuity of strangers. But I've still been kind of envious of all the cataloging, viewing and customization options available to the WordPress crowd: the calendar, the attractive templates, the fact that it's an industry standard, and of course the built-in categories, all make WordPress very appealing to me, as an arsty type and as a systems geek. Let's face it: Them WordPress kids got it all.

Up 'til now, I've always thought the only way I could experience the lovliness that is WordPress was to roll my own blog. This would mean getting a host that has all the proper services -- php, MySQL, whatever else -- installing WordPress, learning it, setting it all up, getting a domain name. Well, you get the idea. I'm not a professional blogger, so I decided to forego that whole rigamarole. When lo and behold -- and I don't even remember how I found them -- I stumbled upon Blogsome.

Blogsome is a lot like Blogger. It's free, and super easy to set up. The domain structure is very similar. But what's cool about Blogsome is that it's basically WordPress. For dummies. And I like that. As far as I can tell, Blogsome sits on top of a good old-fashioned, standard WordPress database. So the templates you use and/or create and/or edit should work with any version of WordPress. And, theoretically, your entire blog could be ported to another install of WordPress should you ever decide, God forbid, to move it or host it yourself. Now I say "theoretically," because I haven't seen any way to get the actual files. So this could be an impossibility, and this is one way Blogger is better. Blogger allows you to host your blog on a different server. But I have no idea what sort of database Blogger uses. I only know that their templates use a proprietary, Blogger-specific syntax. Personally, if I'm going to learn a template syntax, I'd rather it were something a bit more open and extensible. And hosting my blog on another site doesn't really help me much if it still requires Blogger to do anything with it.

Again, all this is basically inspired by my desire for a good category system. The way I'm doing categories on Blogger works. But it's a royal pain-in-the-ass to maintain. On Blogger, each time I write a post, I have to do a whole bunch of stuff to categorize the article: First I have to add links at the bottom of the post to the various category bookmarks at del.icio.us. Then, using a special bookmark that needs to exist in any browser from which I want to do this, I have to add the post to del.icio.us and apply the appropriate tags. This may not sound so bad, but when you compare it to the Blogsome way, it sucks eggs: In Blogsome I simply click the checkboxes of the categories I've defined, while I'm writing my post, and the story is added to the categories and the links are embedded in the post. Sweet!

My initial reasoning for staying with Blogger was that moving would take away precious time from my blogging. But now, implementing categories is taking time away from blogging, and making the whole experience much more painful than it apparently needs to be.

Another nice thing about Blogsome is that it is self-searchable. Searching Blogger yields Google results, whereas searching your Blogsome account yields hits from the blog itself. This is can be implemented in some truly remarkable ways. Blogsome's also incredibly customizable. And the post editor is fantasic.

The main drawbacks are threefold: 1) I'm here now. I'm fairly comfy, and I'm not sure I feel like picking up and leaving. Plus, there are at least a few folks out there who are reading this, and I don't want to disrupt The Readership, though it's simple enough to simply redirect any traffic to the new site I suppose. 2) Blogsome seems a bit slower than Blogger. I'm not sure why, but it's just a bit slower. Probably not a big deal. 3) I'd need to move all my posts to date over to the new site. And this actually supplies a partial reason to move now, if ever. I mean, this site is young. I haven't written that much. Yet. So if I'm going to move, the sooner the better.

Anyway, if anyone out there on the BBI (Big Bad Internet -- and that's you guys, in case you hadn't figured it out) has any suggestions regarding any of this, I would absolutely love to hear them. Anyone use Blogsome? Are there any other advantages or disadvantages to using one over the other that I might not be aware of? I'll be waiting with baited breath. And then I'll go make up my own mind.

And, by the by, here's a sample of The Adventures of Systems Boy on Blogsome.

As usual, I'll keep you posted.

UPDATE 1
(Yes, that was quick.) I've discovered two more drawbacks to moving to Blogsome: 1) I'll either have to move or lose all my comments, not that there are that many, but still... Bummer. 2) The post editor, as far as I can tell, only allows editing raw HTML, whereas in Blogger, if you use Firefox, there's a nice, simple GUI "Compose" mode that lets you format links and text without having to type the code. This starts to cancel out the ease-of-use of categories. I mean sure, I may not have to hand-edit all my categories, but I'll have to hand code all my bold text, italics, and links. Oy!

UPDATE 2
(I'm on fire with the updates.) Turns out there is a graphical editor for the posts at Blogsome, but just like at Blogger, you need to edit in Firefox, not Safari, which is how I managed to miss it. Duh! I must say, though, it's not quite as nifty. It actually just uses something they call "Quicktags," which are just a quick way to insert the code you need, unlike in Blogger's version, which is kind of like a mini-Dreamweaver. A real GUI HTML editor.

UPDATE 3
Another Blogsome drawback: Editing the template is not as easy as at Blogger. Blogger's template is all stored in one file, and you can preview this file as you edit it. Blogsome, on the other hand, breaks the template up into multiple files -- one for the main page, one for the stly sheets, etc. -- and you can't preview your site as you edit. You must save the changes (which can be reverted only by restoring from a backup made by yourself or the system) in order to see your changes. Ugliness.

UPDATE 4
So far, I must say, Blogger continues to lead by a small margin. Sure, their categories aren't as easy, but everything else is. Still, I continue to test...