In the end, a little work and willingness to crack the sucker open got me a $1,100 laptop for about $500. Sometimes its nice to be a geek.

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So I needed a new one, but didn’t want to drop a grand on it. What to do? Well, I found a fixer-upper on eBay for just over $400. Impressively, it’s last year’s model Macbook with maxed out RAM and a good size hard drive. The down side is that it lacks an optical drive, and the keyboard is en Español.

Got the computer in the mail Tuesday. Thanks to “Target Disk Mode” via Firewire, I was able to wipe the drive and install the OS without an optical drive. Had a small hiccough transferring my old data from my Time Machine backup, in that I had forgotten that my backup doesn’t include my applications. Re-doing the transfer from my bootable backup drive fixed that nicely.

So — I’ll be putting about another $100 into the computer, as I got an English keyboard assembly for $30, and an optical drive for about $75 (both on eBay). I even found an online auction for the *brackets* for the optical drive, which is handy since the computer I bought had the drive completely removed (“it was making a funny noise” I’m told).

So now I get to do surgery. Cool! I replaced the hard drive in the Powerbook a couple years back, so I have a bit of experience with cracking open laptops. Should be an interesting exercise, involving steady hands and very, very small screwdrivers.

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1995 – Brendan Eich reads up on every mistake ever made in designing a programming language, invents a few more, and creates LiveScript. Later, in an effort to cash in on the popularity of Java the language is renamed JavaScript. Later still, in an effort to cash in on the popularity of skin diseases the language is renamed ECMAScript.

One Div Zero: A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages.

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In March 1949,[...] an article in Popular Mechanics, describing a state-of-the-art computer called the Eniac, speculated on what lay beyond: “Where a calculator like the Eniac today is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs three tons,” the writer predicted, “computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and weigh only half a ton.” To commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the half-million dollar machine, the supercomputer of its day, a group of electrical engineering students at the university of Pennsylvania duplicated its circuitry on a silicon chip measuring 7.44 by 5.29 millimeters.

“A Shortcut Through Time“
George Johnson
p.103-04

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Google set out with a specific goal: to create a browser that is designed to run mature, full featured web applications; and at first blush, it appears that they have entirely succeeded. I haven’t even tried it on Google’s own applications, such as their online word processor.

The design of this browser is quite different from other browsers, especially under the hood. I’ll probably keep Firefox for general browsing, but I will almost certainly use this for “application” use, from blogging to online banking.

Bravo.

(…and get that Mac version released!)

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I think my all-time favorite was when a non-techie asked me: “This is a stupid question, but what is a byte, anyway?”

(Short answer: a bit is a one or a zero represented in digital data — basically “yes/no” or “true/false”. A byte is a grouping of eight bits that, among other things, can represent a single letter of the alphabet. Ultimately all information on your computer is made up of lots and lots of bits.

Long answer at Wikipedia.)

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From that link:

ZFS is not an incremental improvement to existing technology; it is a fundamentally new approach to data management. We’ve blown away 20 years of obsolete assumptions, [and] eliminated complexity at the source[...].

ZFS presents a pooled storage model that completely eliminates the concept of volumes and the associated problems of partitions, provisioning, wasted bandwidth and stranded storage. Thousands of filesystems can draw from a common storage pool, each one consuming only as much space as it actually needs. The combined I/O bandwidth of all devices in the pool is available to all filesystems at all times.

All operations are copy-on-write transactions, so the on-disk state is always valid. There is no need to fsck(1M) a ZFS filesystem, ever. Every block is checksummed to prevent silent data corruption, and the data is self-healing in replicated (mirrored or RAID) configurations. If one copy is damaged, ZFS will detect it and use another copy to repair it.

So… it’s self-healing and eliminates the idea of volumes, partitions, and the like. Is everything going to work like one giant RAID or something?

More importantly: to my knowledge Windows does not run on ZFS. What is this going to do to all those people who want to run Windows on their Macs? Whither Boot Camp?

The filesystem sounds like it has a lot of good things going for it, but I’m puzzled by some of its claims, and curious about the ramifications thereof. I can’t imagine that Apple would blow away a Mac’s ability to run Windows, as that seems to be a growing selling point, but Steve is sometimes known to do his users some short term damage in his relentless quest for long-term advancement.

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Completely separate from rumors of the Apple phone and commentary on the previously announced iTV (now “Apple TV”), There is another major technology expected to come out of Apple that has largely flown under the radar recently. I’m referring to their upcoming Resolution Independent User Interface.

Probably the biggest reason this has remained on the down-low is that it’s a bit difficult to explain — it can’t easily be reduced to a sound bite the way “Apple phone” or “TV media player” can be; but it’s an important technology for the future of computers and computerized gadgetry in general.

The quick and dirty version of what that is is thus:

Remember back when you had an 800×600 resolution monitor? Later you got a newer monitor with a resolution of 1024×768, and while the screen itself was bigger, icons, text and the like displayed smaller on it — that is, there was more stuff packed into the same amount of screen space. The resolution had gone up. Maybe you didn’t like things smaller, so you figured out how to set the resolution back to 800×600. Maybe you just settled for the smaller icons. Eventually, programs such as Microsoft Word (and for that matter, Windows itself) gained the ability to use “large” icons and text in the toolbars and such, to make up for the shrinking caused by expanded resolution. With the rise of Mac OS X, we saw the ability to use large or small icons on virtually every toolbar on every application.

The real geeks among us even figured out that we could go into Terminal in OS X and change the scaling of the GUI — that is, tell the computer to display programs at a certain percentage of “default” — but that has glitches, and really is more of a hack than anything else. Notably, if you scale something bigger, it looks pixel-y. The nice crisp edges and lines are messed up.

So Resolution Independent User Interface (“RIUI”) is a system by which the operating system is designed to be resizable, no matter what resolution your monitor is. Why is this important? Because as computers become more and more varied in size and form, people are more and more running the same programs on systems as varied as 22-inch high-def screens, to 12-inch laptops, to handheld gadgets such as… the iPhone.

Apple has been quietly talking about RIUI as a feature of an upcoming OS release. Reportedly many people thought it was going to be part of OS 10.4, which it wasn’t, and now it is reportedly going to be part of the upcoming OS 10.5. I personally think we’ve already seen it in action. Where? I’m so glad you asked….

In last week’s Keynote presentation at the MacWorld Expo, Apple CEO Steve Jobs got up on stage and presented the soon-to-be-released iPhone, which is basically a mobile phone and handheld computer running a full version of Mac OS X. The way he showed it to the audience was to actually use one, with a special extra board installed that gave it a video out port so what he was doing could be projected onto the big screen on the stage. Let me say that again. He was holding in his hand a computer with a screen size of a couple inches by a couple inches, and that computer was outputting video that was being displayed on a huge projection behind him on the stage.

Now, If you did that with you average Palm handheld, that big projection would look awfully pixelized. That’s just the nature of taking a certain resolution and sizing it up significantly. Have you ever looked at an image on your computer and zoomed in and in and in until it looked like a bunch of colored boxes? Same thing.

That projection on the stage looked pretty clear to me. It looked like a far higher resolution than the 160dpi that the iPhone reportedly has, but according to Steve (and by all indications as he used it and the projection updated instantly) it was the iPhone in his hand that was creating the image we saw on the projection. I think that Jobs was slyly showing us the Resolution Independent GUI all through his presentation. He never mentioned it, but he subtly got us used to the concept of viewing the same interface image at radically different scales and resolutions without any loss of crispness or image fidelity.

Somewhere down the road when they release this feature as part of an OS, people are going to be pointing to this presentation as the first public unveiling of the technology that Apple has already perfected.

Just remember — you heard it here first.

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