Mac: It could happen to YOU, as well!

How's your backup? It's current, right? Well, let me tell you a story:
It happened during the silent days before Christmas. Life was good. The last backup a couple of days old. Nothing new here. My 12" PowerBook rested next a really noisy SUN-box (with noisy I mean Gee, are we that close to the airport? You get what I mean.). The resting place of my 12" (you notice that I omit the word trusty, do you?) was, as already mentioned, next to that SUN-box. It has been sitting there, peacefully, for about two weeks. To be precise, I sometimes lifted it to my lap (hence the name Laptop) to do some typing, next to the SUN-box, mind you.
While doing a print-run, three days before Christmas, it started to act up. The RAM was maxed out, according to Apple's specs, but some of the programs cannot get enough of it, so I thought that I had taxed it a tad too much. Acting up means that I had to see the Spinning Beachball of Death more often than usual. I closed a couple of programs, we are talking *NIX here, after all, to see if everything else starts to run more smoothly. Things simply got slower. Now I got suspicious. Caches to full? /tmp directory overflowing? I fired up a terminal-session to have a look. I watched the program jumping in the Dock merrily, but no window appeared. I tried to launch Safari, out of curiosity, same thing here. Let's reboot.
It took ages until the PowerBook came up again. A quick check in the /var/log/system.log showed no errors. But it felt different. Something emitted a strange noise. I unplugged the PowerBook to take it someplace else to investigate.

Imagine your favorite suspense music, now!

When I left the room with the SUN-box, the PowerBook emitted a noise similar to a coffee-grinder. It came from the front-left corner of the case (the home of the hard-disk, for non-Mac-users). I placed it on my lap, thus in a slight angle (Laptop remember?), the noise intensified. I tried to hold it straight, the noise changed, but did not disappear. Neither Terminal nor Console displayed any errors, none, zilch, nada. Enough joking around, reboot to Verbose Mode, this mode, in a nutshell, makes OS X behave like any other *NIX system, means you get a lot of diagnostic messages. Nothing to see here. Still grinding. All right, Single User Mode. No errors reported, according to the logs. What is going on?
I rebooted the system using the DVD, DiskUtil told me, that I am not in possession of a hard-disk, great. I mean, it made its presence heard, believe you me! I zapped the PRAM, booted from DVD again and, tadaaaa, a hard-disk. You guessed it, noise but WITHOUT ERRORS.
According to Apple - Support - Discussions - PowerBook G4 12-inch I'm not alone, not that I felt better, though.
I bought a Mac mini to have a backup system and I will try to repair my 12", giving it a chance to earn trusty again.
To be fair, it helped me in the writing of three books and a lot of consulting stuff, but it was always treated with respect.
I'll keep you posted.

*NIX: SUN bashed in Survey

The Register comments on a survey about *NIX vendors called Sun ravaged, IBM lauded in Unix server study, which makes SUN look kind of bad, compared to IBM and HP.
There is one fact that needs some extra consideration IMHO, though. Solaris 10™ is a fantastic OS, but it has two drawbacks:

1. It does some things differently


2. It does require more recent hardware

Number one is some kind of drawback because there are usually more flavors of *NIX in a datacenter, means the admins (FYI: those are the overworked, time-starved folks trying to keep everything up and running) need time to integrate it and will only do so if it really pays off in the not so distant future. There is a solid share of machines still running Solaris 8, believe me. The usual practice to install every new incarnation of an OS, so prevalent in the other OS-camp, does not exist in the *NIX world. It even changes, albeit slowly, among the MS-Windows™ user-base, as well. So, *NIX admins have to switch modes, we are talking of the never touch a running system ([my take:] if it does what it should) world, mind you.
Number two is even harder to tackle, most sys-admins do have some kind of staging system for the various *NIX flavors in production, but more than often not the kind I described in my book (in a nutshell: the little brother/sister of the production system). Means they are not able to test-drive and evaluate the OS. Then there are the–smoothly running–production-machines not capable of running Solaris 10; an upgrade would essentially mean getting new hardware, doing burn-ins, testing, installing the software (maybe doing an upgrade), testing again, and, in worst case, rewriting all kinds of scripts and programs to deal with the changed software; think about time-starved and on a low budget.
To cut a long story short: switching to Solaris 10 would mean a lot of effort and re-learning. These are things sys-admins like; it's the reason they took the job. Provided they have the means, budget and time. Go figure!
The fact that most respondents think that SUN will be the dominant supplier of *NIX systems in five years time shows, that the sys-admins would be willing, if supplied with the two things which are usually cut first: man-power and money.
Just my two cents.

A Writers Wish-List

There is one omission in the wish-lists of Fun Joel, the book is called What just happened?. Maybe it is taboo in Hollywood, but I found it at a local bookstore and read it in an afternoon. My verdict: very entertaining.
Check out the other lists here, here and here.

Links: Ken Levine

I added a new link to my list on this blog, By Ken Levine. He worked on some of my all time favorites like Becker, Frasier, Cheers and M*A*S*H.

(Screen)Writing: Writer/Re-Writer

I found some very interesting thoughts in the article The Myth Of The First Martyr...I Mean...Writer at The Artful Writer.
The article deals with the writer/rewriter myth. IMHO: yes, it is much harder to do a re-write than creating an original manuscript; been there, done that (I might expand on this at a later date, but don't hold your breath).

Musings: Programs are the Means to an End

I wrote the section Which Editor to choose? in the Unix/Linux Survival Guide based on discussions, flamewars and the rest of the whole shebang. But I recently discovered, that this type of discussion seems to spread out of the realm of computers. Sure, everybody thinks that the e.g. car that one owns is the best, or the computer, the T.V., you get the picture. But this is not what I'm talking about at the moment. I'm talking about an unsuspecting customer confronted with We are using [insert your favorite operating system/software-package here] and therefore the end product is far superior to what you can expect from [insert the operating system/software-package you really hate for whatever reason here].
Reality-Check: A customer does not, I repeat, does not care about how something is created, most of the time, that is. The German version of the aforementioned book was written in XML using Emacs (no, I won't tell you which flavor [if you really don't know why I won't tell, look here and here]) and the American version in MS Word. The publishers couldn't care less about the program used to create the manuscript, all they were interested in was to get it in the right format, period. The editor used was a tool, the result was a manuscript.
On a side-note: Try writing a text about *NIX commands like date, apropos, etc. and run Word's grammar-checker on it ;-)
Back on topic, as long as your customer wants an end-product, means no further processing on the customer's side, do not bother, or worse, annoy, him/her how you will create said product. It really does not matter if we are talking graphics, layouts, photos, manuscripts, movie-scripts, buildings, cars, airplanes, or cookies (the baked variety). (Try to avoid the if all you got is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail trap, though.) The worst thing that could happen is an—for whatever reason—annoyed customer.
Quick example: I don't feel that good going to the ATM since I learned that most ATMs are running some kind of MS Windows ™ these days.
:-)

Writing: Setting the right Mood and stick to it!

This is something I found out while working as a programmer, but it applies to writing as well. If you are listening to music while doing one of the aforementioned tasks, there will be a noticeable influence on your writing/coding style. DUH!, I hear you say? Right, but sometimes this fact can be used to your advantage.
Let's say you are supposed to work on something really wild and adventurous and you are actually feel a little more mellow than the work at hand allows – or the other way round for that matter. My cure are specially crafted playlists in Apple's iTunes (also to be found on my iPod, of course). That way I have a weapon against my current mood and, especially effective, against the background music in the different coffee-houses I'm writing in.
Too simple? You bet. Give it a try.
BTW: Regarding coding style, check your variables. Mine were called damn1, damn2, etc. for debugging when I was in a very bad mood, looks ridiculous when doing a code-review later, believe me.

Blog: It's nice to be mentioned

Fun Joel added this very blog on a list of blogs he reads, thanks a million El Duderino.
The downside, there are so many blogs in this list I did not know, that the next couple of days will be hard on my usual schedule.
;-)
Thanks again.