One Thing Leads to Another

So, how’s your day going?

Update: alternate link, in case first one isn’t working.

Thanks to Joi Ito.

First, if you aren’t using Firefox as your primary browser, why not? It works better than Internet Explorer, it’s free, and it’s an easy download. It works on just about any computer, including PCs, Linux and the Mac. One measure of the maturity of Firefox is that I use it on a corporate intranet where a couple of years ago it wasn’t uncommon to find occasional pages that required IE to render properly. Now that’s so rare I can’t remember the last time I encountered a page that failed to display properly using Firefox.

Anyway, if you are using Firefox on a Mac, you should know that there are versions available that are optimized for both the G4 and G5 processors. I installed the G5 Firefox version and am impressed by the noticable speedup. The fact that (almost) native widgets are used is a nice bonus and makes for a much more pleasing visual experience. Sure, if Safari supported all of the Firefox extensions and supported bookmarking of multiple tabs I’d consider using the native Mac browser, but until then I’m a confirmed Firefox user. Also, I haven’t tried the G4 Firefox version, but likely will install it before my next road trip.

The G5 Powermac was introduced a couple of months before I bought my first ever Apple computer, a G4 Powerbook. I knew at the time that the G5 offered much greater performance, but the need for portability indicated that the Powerbook was a much better choice for me. In addition, I have a strong aversion to buying the first version of any new product; besides the higher incidence of bugs in a brand new product, they are usually priced for less budget-minded early adopters.

Fast forward 14 months. The G5 Powermac is now on its second generation, prices have dropped, but still I hesitated. After all, weren’t the much higher performing (3Ghz) models already 6 months late? Why buy the older (2Ghz) model when the 3s would be here any day now?

Why is because any new system announced now won’t be shipping for at least 2-4 months. There is no buzz about new chips being ready; instead it seems that while there are no problems producing the 2Ghz chips, the 2.5Ghz models are still somewhat hard to come by, and the 3Ghz version is simply not ready yet.

Now, add in a little secret: Apple sells refurbished computers at their online store. With discounts over 20%, (when available), and excellent service available, the decision to upgrade now became much easier.

And so I’m the happy owner of a refurb 2.0Ghz dual processor Apple G5 Powermac. I love it. It’s much faster than my Powerbook, and, to the point of this posting, I migrated from my Powerbook in about 1/2 hour.

Given that these are unix machines, I simply mounted my Powerbook as an external firewire drive on the new system, and copied over my home directory and my applications directory. When I was done, it was like I never left home! My screen background, all my apps, menu items, firefox history, you name it, they were all preserved.

I’ve migrated from many windows machines over the years, and it’s always been a complete re-install of all apps, and careful copying to ensure all personal files were saved. What a mind-blowing difference this was! I figured with how busy I am at work that it would be days before I could spend the time to migrate; I finished it late one evening before going to bed.

Oh, and that excellent service I was speaking of? Well, my first Powermac was DOA. It booted, occasionally, but never stayed up for long. An Apple tech confirmed that it was dead, and arranged for the shipment of a replacement model. The next day I printed an Apple provided Fedex label and shipped the bad computer back. Apple shipped the new one, via Fedex overnight, that same day. The bad computer arrived late one Monday afternoon; the new computer was up and running on Wednesday. I stress tested it a couple of days, and by Friday it was my primary machine.

Zoom, zoom, zoom.

I updated the site to the latest version of MovableType, largely to better fight comment spam by using the MT-Blacklist plugin.

The upgrade went well as did the installation of MT-Blacklist. I’ve missed this program lately, as the level of comment (and occasional trackback) spam has been steadily rising and I hadn’t installed version 2 before. Based on past experience, the annoyance factor caused by the spam is going to go way down; thanks Jay!

Another fine example of a 404: Page not Found spoof. Thanks to allaboutgeorge.com.