The Coppit Family Daily News

So about 3 hours after getting my new MacBook Pro, the fan started blowing at full blast. No biggie, I thought, since I was in the process of installing a bunch of software. I stopped what I was doing, and checked the CPU usage with Activity Monitor. The CPU was idle!

At this point the area where I rest my left palm while typing was getting really really hot–too hot to touch for very long. The computer was also getting sluggish, sometimes waiting for over a minute to respond to my mouse clicks or keyboard commands. I shut down the system (with the hold-the-button-for-five-seconds-I-really-mean-it method) and considered my options.

After the machine cooled off a bit I inserted the OS X DVD and booted into the hardware tester program as described in the manual. As that was going on, I gave Apple a call. I told the tech my problem and that I suspected the hard drive. He had me reboot into Disk Utility to verify the disk. Sure enough, it was rife with errors. He said that either the disk was bad, or the original imaging of the software on the drive was erroneous. My best bet was to frst try and repair the disk, and if that didn’t work, wipe the drive and reinstall the OS and applications. Sigh.

After 6 tries the repair failed, so I spent a few hours wiping the drive and reinstalling everything. So far everything has worked fine. In fact, after filling up 80 GB space I still get no disk errors. I just wish that Apple had done a disk verify before shipping me the machine…

There are a number of half-baked ways to resize a boot camp partition out there. Here’s the way I enlarged my NTFS partition. Your mileage may vary with FAT32, shrinking partitions, etc..

• Use WinClone to clone your existing bootcamp volume
• Use Boot Camp Assistant to restore your disk to one volume. When it’s done, reboot to Mac OS X. (I had to do this twice.)
• Run Boot Camp Assistant again to create a new partition.
• Start WinClone, and restore the image into the new UNLABELED partition.
• Reboot, holding the option key to select the Windows partition. Windows will notice that something happened to the partition and will automatically run checkdisk. When you reboot again either partition will work.

I had to do a couple extra steps for VMWare Fusion to work. First, I had to delete my old virtual machine at /Users/[your_user]/Library/Application Support/VMWare Fusion/Virtual Machines/Boot Camp. Simply removing the disk didn’t work. Then VMWare complained that Windows wasn’t shut down cleanly. So you should maybe boot into Windows after the checkdisk before going back to OS X to fiddle with VMWare. Finally, just cancel the re-installation of VMWare Tools once the boot camp VM is running in Fusion.

Generally I’m really happy with my new MacBook Pro. It’s fast, quiet, and keeps me warm in sub-zero weather. But there are some things that bug me:

• I can’t resize a window without accidentally changing both height and width. Apple needs to add modifier key support for one-axis resizing, a la Photoshop
• Icon spacing in Finder is too wide with icon sizes are small
• The file system is pseudo-case-insensitive. This means if you want to change the case of a file, you can’t do “mv A a” You have to do “mv A temp; mv temp a”.
• There is no way to drag an item in Finder into the item’s parent folder.
• Boot camp needs to have the so-called “sleep camp” feature, which does a safe sleep in OS X, then boots into Windows. Reboots cause Coppit to lose desktop state, which makes Coppit sad.
• My mighty mouse doesn’t have real buttons, which means that if I need to drag something from one corner to the next, I have to shove my keyboard out of the way to get there. With a buttoned mouse, I could keep the button down while I lifted the mouse and put it back down.

The College upgraded my machine… I now have a nice MacBook Pro. I’ve had a few issues which I’ll blog separately about. First I thought I’d revisit my Mac customizations, which I first published last year.

Good free software:

• Cyberduck: Secure FTP
• StartupSound.prefPane: Silence the startup “bong”
• Growl: System-wide notifications
• NicePlayer: A clean movie player
• Codecs: Perian, Flip4Mac WMV
• iStat Menus: Shows CPU, network, memory, disk usage in the menu bar. It also supports showing the date along with the time.
• MacFUSE and sshfs: Mount a remote directory for read/write access.

• Audio Recorder: In case I need to record something using the built-in microphone
• Eclipse: For software development
• GraphViz for Mac: Awesome GUI for an awesome graph layout tool
• Integrity: Link checker
• iStumbler: WiFi finder
• Pacifist: Extract files from packages. Useful if you need something from your install DVD
• Sightspeed: For video chatting with people who don’t have iChat
• Thunderbird: News reader, and graphical email viewer
• Spark: Control iTunes with the keyboard
• SimplyRar: Unpack rar archives
• Jing: Screen capture utility. It’s functional but doesn’t have a lot of options.
• SafariBlock: Adblock for Safari. It works with Safari 3.0, but you have to put it in /Library/InputManagers and chmod -R root:admin it.
• Gallery Remote: Upload photos to my gallery
• Fink Commander: For installing Unix stuff like subversion, tetex, etc.
• Apple OS X Developer Tools: gcc, plus a lot of cool performance tools like Shark. Link the /Developer/Applications directory to /Applications/Developer for easier access.
• TinkerTool: Advanced tweaking of options, such as not creating .DS_Store folders on Windows mounted drives

Non-free Software:

• Adobe Acrobat Pro
• Adobe Photoshop CS3. An interesting contender is Pixel Editor. Since I get a site-license discount for Photoshop I use that, but Pixel might be just as good
• AutoPano Pro: Expensive but really good panorama stitching software
• Quicktime Pro
• Saft: A relatively cheap way to improve Safari with features like type-to-search. Not Safari 3.0 compatible yet.
• Compost: Automatically manage the trash can
• Apple iWork: I’m sick of how MS Office for Mac is still stuck in 2004. I thought I’d try out Apple’s offering
• VMWare Fusion: For running MS Office when I really need to and other Windows-only apps. Their “unity” mode is pretty good although it has a few rough edges. I picked VMWare over Parallels because it’s a bigger company with a longer track record, my own good experiences with VMWare on Windows, and relatively less complaints about their VM.
• Adobe Lightroom: For folder-based management of digital pictures and (hopefully soon) videos. I like the interface better than Aperture’s. iPhoto is just too primitive. They won’t let me arrange photos into folders, for example (and “events” doesn’t fully solve the scalability problem). Pretty much the only thing I use iPhoto for is the redeye correction, which works great when it works.

Deprecated software:

• Quicksilver: It’s just too buggy. And on my new laptop Spotlight is usable as an application launcher
• Fugu: I switched to Cyberduck. I like the interface better.
• MS Internet Explorer: Not offered any more
• Norton Anti-Virus: Just not necessary
• iView MediaPro 3: Bought by Microsoft, and generally very clunky. I really like (1) how it can manage videos, and (2) its folder-based management. The second issue is handled decently by Lightroom (but not iPhoto), and I hope the first issue will be resolved soon.
• Synk: I’m using a hand-rolled rsync solution which works with my unRAID server to make backups take up less space.
• Missing Sync: I’m limping along without syncing my Palm for now. I’m hoping that Apple will add appointment entry soon to the iPod Touch so it can become my new PDA.
• RealVNC: You can connect with the vnc:// built-in now.
• iChatOnLogin: iChat has this functionality now.
• iCalFix: It’s fixed now.