And now - Retina

I've just finished migrating to a MacBook Pro with a retina screen. I had ordered it over 4 weeks before heading out on vacation, but it didn't arrive. I was beginning to think Apple was starting to sell vaporware...

A friend coming up to visit brought it up, and I let it sit a few days before taking a deep breath and starting the migration. The first day I had to give up - all applications have to be closed in order to use the migration assistant. So I waited until getting ready for bed, and then started in.

Of course, I had made the usual mistake and set the new one up with my normal account name. I did that by mistake with the last one, and had to re-install the operating system from the disk in order to set up an admin account in a crazy name, and then set up my regular name for me. This computer doesn't have a disk, though, so I suppose I'll have to live with it and rename all the paths in configuration files... groan.

It announced that it would need 5 hours to transfer the 250 GB clogging my old machine (and yes, it ended up taking 5 GB of temp crap with it). After brushing my teeth it was 5.5 hours, after reading a mystery novel for 2 hours it was down to 3:58. Anyway, it was done in the morning.

I got to work after breakfast, and we had some more gotchas:

• TrueCrypt would not work. Panic. I ended up having to install beta version 1.7a before I could decrypt my data.
• Fugu hollered at me that this Mac would not execute PowerPC stuff, full stop. Had to download the pre-release candidate 1.2.1pre1 in order to access the off-machine stuff not on Dropbox.
• Lion felt a pressing need to deal with some updates. It wanted to update all sorts of stuff I never really use, so I unchecked all that. Didn't have the Internet set up yet, just using the old box as a router. Oops: 

  

  This will take all week...

  No way I'm going to wait that long! I figured it was the stupid modem, so I restarted to old box. Sure enough, now we only needed about an hour for it all to download. Installed it, restarted the system, check. 

• Then we had a classic Catch-22: I tried to access the Huawei-Internet modem directly and not through the old box. No dice - I needed a Java Runtime Environment. WTF? I had one on my old system! Why is this not a standard part of the OS? And to download the runtime environment I need what? Right! Internet! So I put the stick back on the old box and fiddled around until I found something that offered to install Java for me. Took another half an hour to get it downloaded and installed.
• Surprise! All of the network definition information was not transferred!. I only have like 25 or 30 different networks I work in that all have bizarre problems that I sort out with my network definitions. Luckily, the old computer was still working (although it is making strange noises). 
• We have Internet! And Adium works, as does YoruFukurou. 
• How about Thunderbird? That tends to be a bitch. And indeed, I am greeted by pristine email boxes, not the 2000+ emails that should be there. And a missing archive. Okay, this will be a path problem, as I couldn't us my normal name. I'll just have to set that up again for each email account. Except that there is no /User/me/Library/... directory anymore. Gulp! Luckily, we have internet, so I mouse around and find the super secret magic trick: cmd + shift + G and blindly enter in the directory you want to visit, and it will be shown to you. And it works, and there was my email. WTF? Is Apple trying to save me from fussing with the OS or what? I looked for the box to tick to show me "hidden" files, nothing to be found. But I did find Tinker Tool while digging around and that had lots of cool boxes to tick to make the Mac work again. Thanks for saving my day!
• I do not like the way the touchpad/mouse scrolls, so I switched the direction on that.
• I started reading my emails, and opened up an attachment. Or rather, tried to start Word. Please enter my product activation key! Excuse me? I figure it out from the old machine, except that that one is a 20 digit number and now it wants 25 digits. Panic email to the engineer as school asking if he has any idea. Nope, we have a school license for as many copies on school computers as we need. I click on the 30 day free trial, enter my email address, and it now defaults back to my normal view and the 20 digit number. Okay, either it now works, or I panic in 30 days. Or start using Open Office in earnest.

Okay, my editing tool works, no more excuses. The calendar and the address book now have a fancy cutesy skin that I can't seem to find a way to shut off. And screenshots keep getting dumped back on the desktop instead of the directory I managed to get the old machine to use instead. Why couldn't it take all of my settings over? I'll probably have to set up the gazillion printers I know and love - yup, they didn't make it over, either. Yuck. 

The screen is very crisp - but I have an eyeache right now. I hope it is just staying up late reading last night. So it cost me a day. Not very user friendly. Oh, and I set up the Save As... to do Export...... I wonder if this is going to be my last Mac? It is getting far too Windows like....

Update: Wanted to fix my web page and called up Dreamweaver CS3. I know, CS6 is the current version, but why pay Adobe all that money for stuff I don't need? Photoshop works. Indesign works. But all I get is this:

Um, right. OK. 

No idea what's up. I did find a thread at Adobe though, and the solution is to copy the configuration directory (mine was 95 MB large?!) from the old machine to the new one. I renamed the directory on the new machine to crap, just in case I needed it again. I didn't. Works like a charm

My new pad

I am now the proud owner of a pad - not an iPad, but a LifePad, from Aldi. Yes, that's the store with the cheap food because they buy in bulk and don't have fancy stores. They tend to have quite good computer stuff, actually, because they also buy them in bulk. The last time I didn't buy an Aldi computer I cursed for months and had the stupid box back in the shop twice before it was finally tamed.

Anyway - went to my local Aldi, they still had them available at 9 am for 399 €. Popped the box at home - wow, what an assortment of cables. I'm going to need a new cable purse for this! And for 14,95 € I can buy a pink case for it. If this works even half heartedly, I'll pop for the pink.

Out of the box, looks nice, a bit hefty, but sits nicely in my hand. Hook up the electricity, this will be the first problem, as the socket is symmetric. The cable is labelled - actually, everything is labelled to perfection - with a big "TOP" sticker.

Turn it on, and after a bit of booting it's there. The volume control thingys stick out a bit too much for my taste, and getting the SIM card in, even with the little paperclip things they deliver for those who have no paper clips, entailed me having to take off my glasses for a closeup look in order to figure it out.

The installation went flawlessly, although I do have a Google account already set up for my Android smartphone. I dug through the Android market and pulled down my favorite apps. Easy as pie. Found a fantastic handball app with the scores for the entire leagues in Europe.

There's a leather-like case, not the cute folding triangle thing that the iPad has, but nice enough. The only problem up until now is the greasy fingerprints. I cleaned the screen and put on the screensaver, that didn't work too well, there are a few bubbles although I really tried to keep it flat using a ruler. The little pull-tab things on the screensaver didn't come off cleanly, but that will surely sort itself out.

So the test will be this afternoon, I'm taking it to the doctor's office with me. If I can grade the exam using it, or actually write some text, it wins. Stay tuned.

Playing with Ubuntu

Our labs purchase new high-end computers every 3-5 years, depending on the system. I don't know that we will continue to do so - it seems all the students have laptops these days, anyway. But when we do purchase new ones, we have to dispose of the old ones. After the school has asked around if anyone needs a computer (and we did, we had two new staff members who really only needed typewriters, they are fine on these boxes) the rest are sold off to anyone interested. I bought 2, one for WiseKid and one for WiseMan.

Read more »

Weizenbaum: Rebel at Work

The INFOS09 conference in Berlin showed a film from 2006 about Joseph Weizenbaum, Rebel at Work, last night. They invited the filmmakers to discuss the film with the audience afterwards.

The film tells the biography of Joseph Weizenbaum, a critical voice in the tidal wave of technical enthusiasm that computer technology has brought us. His book "Computer Power and Human Reason" (Die Macht der Computer und die Ohnmacht der Vernunft) was first published in 1976 and is still important today for understanding computing ethics.

His stories of his early life as a Jewish boy in pre-WWII Berlin, intercut with some historic footage is quite interesting, but once the film follows him to the US things get chaotic. We have some interviews with his ex-wife (with no explaination offered for why she is an ex-), some nice pictures of him with other founding fathers of computing, and some bizarre clips from 50s films on what an engineer is and how to act during an atomic bomb attack: Duck and cover.

The sirens make me feel ill, as they remind me of my own childhood and the panic I felt when this siren would squeal, signaling yet another (we hoped) drill as we filed into the shelters or practiced ducking under our desks. I inquired after the film as to why they chose these sequences. Oh, they said, we wanted to give the audience a feel for the 50s in the US. Well, why didn't they focus on WonderBread? Play Elvis? Show a church service? Ah, well, it fit their pre-conceived notions, I suppose. The clips have nothing to do with Weizenbaum, and I found them jarring, as they often did not fit in the timeline that was jaging back and forth in time.

In the last third one of Weizenbaum's four daughters joins the story, speaking about reading in her father's library and such. Suddenly, the film is over. And in a voice-over during the credits, Weizenbaum asks for forgiveness for lies he may or may not have told.

It was nice to see him, and to hear his funny little stories. But I was not impressed with the film, as it does not tell the story promised in the title: Rebel at work. Perhaps "Pioneer now retired" would have been more fitting. There was nothing explaining his criticism of the belief in computer technology that so pervaded his time - it was assumed that the viewer understood this.

A few scenes were shown of him at a discussion at the University of Jena, but there was no clear explanation here either.

I had the supreme privilege of hearing him speak at the University of Kiel end of the 70s. I attended the talk, not knowing who he was, just because it was in English. But my, what a storyteller he was, and how he fascinated me with these foreign notions of ethics and responsibility for the technology we create.

I enjoyed reading his work over the years, and was happy when he came back to Germany after retiring from MIT. He was often a guest speaker at the Humboldt University, I attended a number of his talks. The plans for our soon to be published book [shameless plug!] on computing and ethics was born over a glass of wine after one of his talks, many years ago.

Joseph Weizenbaum died in 2008 - and a hardworking rebel he was. What a shame this does not come through in the film.

Firebird and Plugins

I am pissed at both Firefox and Thunderbird today.

Not only did they interfere with teaching the other day: please, pretty please, download this pressing security update, they seem to say. My Mac goes into slow motion when updates need to be installed.

I gave in to Thunderbird a few days ago and restarted it - and OpenPGP disappeared. Not compatible with the current version. Fume.

Then Firefox updated - and my delicious posting plugin got itself disabled. Delicious is my memory extension - now I saw this site the other day..... I can't remember how, but if I tagged it on delicious, I can find it again. So anytime I say: nice page, I quickly do a right-mouse-key, select delicious, type in a tag or three and save. Painless. Extremely useful. And now disabled.

And with Adobe wanting me to download an update for one of the gazillion things in Creative Suite ever other day and iWork wanting me to shell out for a new version and iTunes really, really needing another update to disable something interesting I used to be able to do and Mac itself always needing updates that will restart the system: Darn it, leave me alone! I want to work. Leave all my applications open where they were when I got interrupted. And continue where I left off without having to update, close, store, restart, and now: where was I? I end up played a few rounds of word games in Facebook to combat the frustration, and it is midnight again......

Internet Everywhere

After fussing with Telia to force them to sell me an Internet flat-rate despite not having an active personnr, I must say that I am quite impressed by the service.

You get a little white dongle (they come in black and pink, too) from Huawei called the E220 that you stick into your USB slot. Under Windows there is an autorun file that first thinks that this is a USB stick, and then installs all the software for you. You enter in your PIN, click on the server you want, and off you go!

For the Mac the software was broken and terminated immediately. But luckily I have the Windows emulation software Parallels, so I installed it there and downloaded the drivers and a little application from the Huawei site. Worked like magic, is very stable and fast enough that I could even have a sort-of video conference with the Princesses in the US over Skype. Awesome.

The family hijacked my laptop this evening in order to watch Sonnenallee, my laptop being the only thing that will play DVDs here. So I fussed with the EeePC - and guess what? It works! There is an idiot-proof description of how to get it running that I found. Works like a charm.

So now I can take a fully charged EeePC outside with me and use the Internet for a couple of hours! Only in Sweden, of course. England and France seem to have this kind of deal sorted out, too: flat-rate for mobile Internet. But Germany, as always, is dawdling. Wonder how long it will take before Vodafone brings this delight to the Teutons? I wish there was some way that we could *make* them give us what we want and need!

Give One Get One

Now this is a great idea for collecting donations from geeks! Our inner children has been hankering to get our mitts on one of those XO-1 computers. They came up with the "Get One, Give One" campaign, a pure stroke of genius. If you donate 200$ to them so they can give an XO-1 computer to a child in need, you are allowed to purchase one for yourself at 199$. Plus tax, but what the heck, this is cheaper than an XBox, you do a good deed, and you are the only one on your block with this new toy.

I had gotten to play with one when SJ brought one with him to the CCC yearly conference. Everybody came to the Wikipedia stand, not to talk about the Wikipedia, but to play with the box.

Ordering was, um, strange. I had checked yesterday that it was fine to buy it from a foreign country if you had a shipping address in the US. My geek brother was more than willing :)

The call-center lady today seemed to be on her first day on the job. She had trouble reading the scripts. Her "Thank-you-for-calling" was not enthusiastic, but read slowly and haltingly in a non-inflected voice. Even though I said that I wanted to buy one, she slowly read to me the paragraphs on what the XO-1 is and what this special offer is. Yes, yes, yes, get on with it!

She took my shipping address sloooooowly, having problems understanding the words I was saying. "Newmarket" is "new" and "market", I had to spell it for her 3 times before she got it. As I was giving my credit card number she gave no feedback whatsoever as I paused between groups, normally they assent "yes" or "unha" to let you know that they are still there.

Spelling my e-mail address (even though it is identical to my name and then a German provider) was tricky. I wonder if I will get an email. Anyway, I got a confirmation number. It will take 2-4 weeks to deliver in the US and another 6 weeks or so to ship it to Europe. I am so impatient, but I will be the coolest kid on the block with my cool green XO-1!