Need your MacBook repaired? Wait a while ...

So after all the fun I had with the MacBook, I eventually found that my MacBook fell victim to the usual MacBook discoloration and random shutdown problems. So did the other MacBook in Exoweb that was purchased at the same time. Last week, we sent the first of them in for repairs with Apple. Guess what the company sysadmin got back as a response from Apple?

"Apple said there's no hardware in the entire world to fix your laptop---they have to manufacture it first. "

So if you're like me and need all these issues fixed, I guess you're going to have to wait a while for the spare parts. At least for me, the random shutdown is limited to once per day, when I work the computer too hard after it has been idle for too long (either in suspend mode or just sitting there unused for several hours.) Once it has shut down once, pressing and holding down the power button for 5 seconds restarts the computer just fine and as long as I keep it busy the rest of the day, the random restarts go away.

Macbook Day 3

8 am saturday morning and I am up, messing around with development, writing code and tests. Big deadline coming up? No. Urgent bugfixes? No. Just testing out the MacBook as a development environment. So far, I must say I'm quite happy.

Since my projects all run on debian stable in production, my development needs are quite simple - a Unix-like environment and the usual array of FOSS tools. With a little bit of effort (about 4 hours, most spent just waiting for things to download), I managed to duplicate my production environment via darwin ports on OSX. The only thing that didn't match was the operating system - OSX does work a little differently from Debian linux.

This worked out decently. Writing code, especially when you're used to using emacs in a terminal, is the same everywhere. Running tests is usually the biggest problem. The problem I had with the old powerbook was that it took 90 minutes to 2 hours to run the full suite of the tests at the time, a bit too long for the write-test-commit cycle. On our server class machines (3 Ghz Xeons), these tests take 20 minute to run. Still too long (refactoring coming up shortly) but acceptable.

With the MacBook, tests take 30 minutes to run natively. Not quite a match for server class machines, but comparable to and in some cases, faster than our development desktops. If we refactored the tests to run more in parallel, results would be better as current tests only use one of the two cpus in the MacBook.

However, there is one problem with running all this on OSX - it's not exactly our production environment and we have been bitten before with slight differences between behaviour on different systems. What works fine on Gentoo crashes and burns on Debian ... etc.

In comes the Parallels virtualization product, a virtual machine solution targeted for OSX on Intel. A quick download of the software, a few clicks and 30 minutes later, I had a minimal Debian stable install running. Another 30 minutes later, I had a full development environment installed and running inside the virtual machine. The virtual machine was fast, responsive and fully functional. The full suite of tests took 45 minutes to run - not zippy, but still far better than the powerbook and usable until the great test refactoring happens.

I'm really pleased with this laptop. All my needs are more than adequately met by this system for the forseeable future. I just might need to upgrade the hard drive in a few months, as the 60G I'm starting with is a bit small. All these virtual machine images will eventually add up.

MacBook Day 1

I read PlanetPython a lot, and one of the interesting things I've noticed is the number of Mac posts I've seen there over time. Various Python personalities keep getting their latest MacBook (Pro) and talking about their great experiences with them.

Well, I gave in (really did not take much convincing) and joined the crowd. Got myself the lowest end MacBook, the 1.83 GHz model, with the lowest end specs. Then immediately maxed out the RAM to 2G. I figured I could live with the 60G hard drive (I don't actually pack very much) but I might one day need to run the parallels virtualization software and more memory never hurts when you're trying to run multiple OSes at the same time.

Day one has been pretty good. It really didn't take all that long to get up and fully functional on the new system. All OSX systems include a nice utility to migrate your data over, but I lacked a firewire cable so I had to manually scp my home directory from my Powerbook over to the MacBook. After installing all the other apps I used regularly (Colloquy, Adium, Firefox, OpenOffice.org, darwin ports), everything else just worked like the old Powerbook, just a lot faster. It's nice how OSX puts almost all your user settings into your home directory, making moving everything really easy.

It's funny how the lowest end MacBook beats the crap out of an 8 month old Powerbook, but I guess that's just the power of the new Intel chips. Things are responding much faster now and I believe I can actually use this new system for serious development, rather than ssh'ing to servers to run CPU/IO intensive tasks. We'll see though. Ports is still building the dependencies needed to run my main project applications.

I suppose lots of other people have given their impressions on the MacBook, but my own impressions have all been really positive so far. The screen is much brighter and crisper than the old PB. I like the much larger trackpad and the new keyboard is decent, though it requires a little more force than the old PB. My fingers must have gotten weak.

Heat really doesn't appear to be that much of a problem. I tried running both CPUs at 100% for about 15 minutes and while it got warm, it was usable. In regular usage (darwin ports compiling stuff in one window, me writing in another), it gets a little warmer than the PB, but still usable on bare skin lap. Would be a lot nicer in winter than summer though.

I plan to use the system extensively for development, especially while traveling around Europe later this month. This laptop is going to get a much more intensive workout than the PB. After I found that the PB took up to 3 times longer than my regular desktop to run a full suite of tests on one of my projects, I stopped using it for actual development (was great as an emailing/document generating machine). We'll see how things turn out after darwin ports finishes compiling all the dependencies and I run the full suite of tests for the first time.

Full Emacs Keybindings in OSX

One fun thing about reading blogs - you learn little gems that you wouldn't encounter otherwise, sometimes even when you search for it. When I got my Mac in August last year, I was thrilled to find that it supported emacs style key bindings in most Cocoa applications. However, it wasn't complete support - while all the control key bindings worked (^f, ^b, ^p, ^n, etc), the ALT/option button bindings did not. So I missed useful keys like page up (Alt-v) or forward one word (Alt-f).

I did spend a couple of hours searching on this, particularly in the help documents and knowledge base contained in the Mac and on google. No luck. I eventually resigned myself to working without the Alt keys and chugged along mostly happy. That is, until today, when I read Erica Sadun's blog on the Mac DevCenter RSS feed.

Turns out that all I really needed was this Apple Developer article on Key Bindings in OSX, including Emacs examples. It was as simple as adding my own custom definitions in ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict.

The OSX key binding capability is actually quite impressive. You can even do multi-keystroke bindings, such as ^x^f (if you really miss Emacs that much).

Another day, another great functionality to rave about in OSX :)

Goodbye apt-get

So it's finally time to leave apt-get, at least on my desktop machine, and go down the path of bsd and ports. I gave up on fink for my software packaging needs and switched to OpenDarwin instead. The main reason for the choice was that OpenDarwn has a larger and more updated package list, so it requires less manual downloading and package dependency resolving. The small price of learning a slightly different controlling program (port vs apt-get) was more than outweighed by the ease of typing 'sudo port install x' and just walking off and letting it do all the work. The lack of a central repository (OpenDarwin downloads the tarballs directly from the original site, not from a central repository) makes it difficult to use a repository cache, but I guess that's irrelevant since I am the only one in the office that uses OpenDarwin anyway.

Also took care of the clunky OpenOffice issue by installing NeoOfficeJ. My colleages have not had good experiences with the older versions but the latest version does not seem too bad. Fires up relatively quickly and seems stable, but I must admit that I have not used it too extensively. Will know more later.

One minor annoyance with OSX are the emacs keybindings, or the lack of two of them. Almost all the commonly used ones are here, even the obscure ones. However, there are two that I use very frequently that are not found in the text editor programs - Meta-f and Meta-b. These go forward and back one word, respectively. I have ctrl-f and ctrl-b, which move one letter at a time, but I have gotten very used to the one word movements that I seriously feel the lack without them. In terminal, all the Meta-x keys are done via option-x, and in text editors, some of this is there. option-backspace is backspace one whole char, the same as Meta-backspace in emacs. However, the option-f and option-b keys produce some strange characters, instead of replicating their Meta-x behaviours. Ah well. At least option-arrow key still moves on word at a time, but I'm too lazy to move my entire hand the few cm required to hit them :)

One other note - never use transparencies on anything you want a fast response time from. I had a slight transparency going on my terminals and was wondering why text-mode emacs was moving dog-slow. Once the transparency was shut off, it was back the good old speeds you have come to expect and love from text terminals. Even with the high-end graphics cards that all these machines come with, transparency is still very expensive on the CPU

Powerbook day 5

(Originally posted 20050810)

So it has been 5 days with this nice little bit of hardware and I am liking it greatly. It occurs to me though, that my blogs do not reflect this. I am more likely to point out its shortcomings and difficulties than all the things I love about it. So I thought I'd spend this blog writing about it. I'll try to gloss over the stuff that most other people rave about and focus on what is special about it to me as a full-time developer.

Ok, the usual stuff people rave about:

1. Beautiful, well thought out design
2. It Just Works!
3. Consistent UI
4. Sleeps and recovers in less than 4 seconds
5. High quality hardware

The other stuff that makes me use it as my primary workstation, despite its currently lower performance:

1. Power users welcome

While Apple may have been one of the first to properly implement a GUI and has one of the slickest interfaces around, the mouse is almost totally optional! People like me who like to work primarily through the keyboard interface can actually navigate around purely with the keyboard, using the mouse very rarely. For me, this is a significant speed increase as keyboard shortcuts are far faster than using the mouse. Additionally, because the key bindings are very similar to emacs (my main development environment), everything is comfortable and familiar.

One other cool thing about emacs key bindings is the very limited hand movement. You can reach just about all the keys without moving your hand more than a centimeter from standard rest position. You do not even have to move your hands the ~10 cm required to hit the arrow keys (3-4 cm on a laptop), thereby not disrupting your typing speed. Yes, I am anal about these things. But it does make a serious productivity difference to me.

2. *nix base

While the flashy GUI protects new users from having to deal with the guts and internals of the OS, you can still pop open the hood as necessary. Fire up the terminal program and you can see which processes are the memory/cpu hogs, what crazy programs are running riot, etc. You can fire up your trusty shell scripts to perform routine tasks, run all the *nix applications which we know and love, etc. Get down to the OS level and figure out exactly why that peripheral is not working, if you can.

Granted, this is no different from any *nix environment, but it is a *nix environment with few of the warts. In many ways, it feels like a *nix desktop done _right_.

3. It Just Works!

Ok, so I ran out of other points. But this is a point I cannot emphasize enough. Almost everything works without problems, in exactly the way you would expect it to in a perfect world. One click/keypress often produces the results you are looking for. Things run effortlessly. You waste so little fighting the GUI/OS and so much time just being productive. All the little annoyances that bugged you, be they in the Linux, BSD or Windows world, seem to be magically gone here. No need to spend days or weeks tweaking/configuring it.

Ultimately, the powerbook and osx is what I consider the ultimate combination - the simplicity that Windows promised, the power and security of *nix, all combined in one very well designed package. It is a testament to what attention to detail and usability can do. The hardware, while of high quality, is commodity. Any other company can manufacture materials of comparable quality. However, no one can put it together, hardware and software, the way Apple has done with their computers or iPod.

Powerbook Day 4

(Originally posted 20050809)

It is closing in to my 96th hour with the powerbook and it has been a fun experience so far. The first 48 hours was when I had to do the bulk of my learning - getting used to the "Mac way", installing applications and waiting for stuff to download. After that, it has been mostly smooth sailing.

The only issues I've encountered so far is the relative slowness of the ppc chip and OpenOffice.org clunkiness. The OpenOffice.org clunkiness is just because the standard installation uses X11 and is not well integrated with the rest of the desktop at all. Things like one click in email to open a document just do not work. It is a cumbersome multi step process. I'm currently downloading NeoOfficeJ (based on OOo) but the slow download speeds in China really takes a while. Still, not a big deal.

The more serious issue is the performance of the system for number crunching. After I had set up my development environment, I was surprised to find that CPU intensive unit tests in my projects took twice as long as they did on my old laptop. Functional tests (fire up all the servers, do black box testing using simulated browsers) took 4-5 times longer. This makes the powerbook substandard as a development station.

A simple test of this is to run code like this:

a = 1
for i in range(1,1000000):
    a = (a + i)/i


On my laptop and workstation (1.5Ghz AMD Athlon, underpowered by today's standards), this takes 0.8 seconds to run. On the default python program on OS X, this takes 1.3 seconds! Using the version of python obtained from fink, this drops to 1.1 seconds, but still far slower than the Athlon systems. This is all using python 2.3.5.

Have not looked into detail for the reasons behind this, but I suspect that it is in part because OS X is tuned to be a desktop, not a server. Responsiveness of the GUI is paramount.

At any rate, this is disappointing, but not a deal breaker for me. While it means I have to run the intensive functional tests on a separate, development machine, I can still use the powerbook for most of my daily work. I always have a workstation somewhere within ssh distance of me anyway, and sadly enough, most of my daily work does not involve CPU intensive activity anymore. Things such as responsive email, web browsing and document editing are more important.

It's Powerbook Time!

(Originally posted 20050807)

I finally gave in to the dark side this saturday. Could not resist it any more. I finally broke down and ... got me a Mac. A powerbook to be exact. Retired my old x86 laptop and went down the path of OS X and the PPC (temporarily). It has been an interesting 48 hours as I tinker with my machine, getting it ready for duty as my development machine on Monday.

There are quite a few reasons for getting the powerbook. They range from the superior quality of the hardware itself, to the "It Just Works" experience that my colleagues were experiencing with their Apple laptops, to sheer lust for all the nifty features that came fully functional on a standard OS X install. All these great features and I would not be giving up the *nix environment that I have grown so comfortable on after all these years on Linux desktops.

My greatest challenges in the last 24 hours have been adjusting myself to the "Mac" way of doing things and configuring the laptop for development. I have until Monday, as there will be certainly no time for me to do any fiddling with my development system once the workday begins. 

Navigating around an OS X system is relatively easy using a mouse, but for a variety of reasons (speed, looming RSI and the unwillingness to carry an extra mouse peripheral), I prefer to use the keyboard for most of my functions. The average linux (KDE/Gnome) desktop allows you to do this rather well, but with a rather different set of key bindings. The biggest thing to get used to is the Alt/Command difference. Coming from an emacs background is both a blessing and a curse. Most of the OS X apps support emacs bindings with the control key, especially cursor movement (^f, ^b, ^p, ^n, etc). Unfortunately, they do not support the Alt keys, as the equivalent of the Alt on OS X is the Command key and keys like Cmd-b and Cmd-f are already used, being Bold and Find, respectively. These are keys I use a lot in navigation (move forward one word, move back one word), so I find myself having to use a lot more keystrokes than I used to. I'm sure that I'll get used to this in time though.

After spending a few hours learning the system and adjusting it to my preferences, I realized that I would have to repartition the system. I wanted to reserve HD space to put a linux ppc distribution on it later, just in case something came along that OS X could not do. Unfortunately, repartitioning a HFS filesystem is a destructive process at present, so I was forced to wipe the system and reinstall. Fortunately, this process is relatively painless. You pop in the disk, select a few options (less than even an ubuntu install) and you can almost leave it alone till it is finish about 30 minutes later. It was the easiest system install I have ever done in my life.

After that, the next challenge was simply setting up a development environment on OS X. OS X is meant to be a consumer desktop, not a development workstation, despite its BSD/*nix roots. It is quite a bit more effort to install the necessary applications I need to develop on. Fortunately, I could draw upon the experience of several of my colleages, particularly Adam. Following his advice, I went with fink to provide most of the resources I needed. I suppose I could have tried OpenDarwin instead, but fink gave me the familiar apt-get tools from Debian.

After downloading the necessary .dmg file from the site, installation and usage of most applications was relatively easy. The major applications such as python2.3 and postgresql 7.4.x was installed with "apt-get install x". The smaller, lesser known applications were more of a pain though. Things such as psycopg, twisted and clearsilver required source installs as they were not in the repository. I even played with DarwinPorts for a while as it had most of those packages. Unfortunately, the DarwinPorts versions were newer than what I needed, so it was back to source installs.

Finally, a little under 48 hours after I got the laptop, my development station was set up, all systems were running and I was ready to develop. It has been an interesting experience so far and the laptop has been a joy to work with.