Mar 7

All Antsy in the Pantsy

Mac, Technology

Recently I’ve been getting really twitchy. You see, I’m the kind of person who needs new computers every 8-12 months. Not from a purely technological standpoint, as my machines are fast enough for what I do. There’s just a feeling you get from knowing your machines are on the cutting edge that just feels empowering. While I was initially cool on the MacBook Pro, I’m now finding myself in full on covet mode. I’m even considering somewhere in my head the dream of going laptop only, and having it be my sole machine for work and home.

For photoshop work, this is pretty impractical as 13 megapixel images will pretty much cripple any current Apple laptop, at least until we get universal binaries from Adobe who-knows-when. While Lightroom being a universal binary would go a long way, there are still a lot of things I do in Photoshop that I can’t replace in Lightroom at the moment.

Also, storage would be an issue. I currently use roughly a Terrabyte of storage for various things, and that’s not going away. While that could end up on a server somewhere, that’s still another machine laying around.

Also, all of my 10.4 and above machines continue to randomly kernel panic. Yesterday I updated the laptop to 10.4.5 which then paniced on restart, and today at work my dual 2.0 g5 paniced while controlling another machine via ARD. Oh how I long for the stable days of 10.3.

Today I should be getting in a dual 2.7 for work, which will be nice. I’m starting to feel the drag on the dual 2 as strange as that sounds.

I can’t tell you how much I hate working in lotus notes. One of the key reasons for wanting to start my own business is so that I can choose which technologies I use to get my job done, sadly, this includes e-mail. Seriously, I die a little inside every time I launch notes.

On the other hand, I migrated over our old Filemaker pro 4 job tracking database to Filemaker 8 this week, and spent maybe 2 hours total updating layouts and scripts to accommodate for OS X. That was pretty awesome. For all of Filemaker’s shortcomings, they do a ton of back-end work making sure things stay compatible and don’t break.


9 comments so far...

  • Bryan Said on March 7th, 2006 at 6:19 pm:

    I just don’t get this issue you have with 10.4. I’m not having this, none of my employees machines have this problem, none of our clients are having this problem, etc. There must be some other cause of this… Running anything non-stock?

  • The Big Swede Said on March 7th, 2006 at 8:00 pm:

    I’m with Bryan. Tiger has been my friend. Haven’t even seen a KP. (Knock on wood.)

    Safari has been acting a little wonky occasionally, but that’s about as bad as it gets.

    Have you tried cleansing your aura?

    Oh, and I hate you damn DINKs and your disposable income.

  • Joe Mullins Said on March 8th, 2006 at 8:27 am:

    Well, I got rid of pocketmac and it’s wretched machinations. but beyond that, there’s almost nothing non stock. There are 2 things remaining that could be the issue.

    1. Iridium. Makes the os look pretty with a unified theme, no theme switching apps or anything, just a change to the extras.rsrc file. There’s a version explicitly for 10.4.5, and haven’t read anywhere about kernel panics.

    2. MenuMeters. Unlikely, but it is hacking things to be there, so I made sure I have the latest version yesterday.

    I’m not running any kernel extensions. Iridium is the most likely candidate, but I’m not seeing anything in logs that would indicate nastiness leading to a crash or panic.

  • Joe Mullins Said on March 8th, 2006 at 8:29 am:

    for what it’s worth:

    http://www.macintouch.com/readerreports/macosx10_4_4/topic3924.html

  • Joe Mullins Said on March 8th, 2006 at 9:38 am:

    Okay, at work I’ve got the MS keyboard and mouse kexts and USB Overdrive, but neither are on my laptop.

  • Dad Said on March 9th, 2006 at 12:58 pm:

    Haven’t had a kernel panic on the dual 2.0 since 10.2

  • His Holiness Said on March 18th, 2006 at 10:41 pm:

    It hurts me to say it, but I am with Brian too. 10.4 has been very nice to me. The only time I ever have a kernel panic is when I unplug my wonky-ass wi-fi adaptor that is not supposed to work with my old as hell machine anyway… and even that is irregular. And you know I am otherwise a complete and udder wanker.

  • Bryan Said on March 19th, 2006 at 6:54 pm:

    It’s nice to see that some things never change, and that it still pains His Holiness to agree with me on something. :)

  • His Holiness Said on March 21st, 2006 at 1:28 am:

    Well… You didn’t agree that I am a complete and utter wanker – so perhaps some things DO change?

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