Windows - still stupid after all these years

Now that i am using Windows 7 a lot more for work i am so upset in how useless it is for common tasks. We all knew that file operations were pretty much broken in previous versions, it took forever to do any meaningful stuff with lots of file and it tied up your machine, sort of like working on a beige mac running system 7.

So today i finally got around to do some file maintenance. I attached a 1 terabyte LaCie Quadro external hard disk to the macbook pro using firewire 800 and proceeded to copy about 25 gig of files from the mac to the windows partition. Most of the time was spend figuring out which files to move, the actual 1-5 gig copy operations were complete before i could decide on the next group.

Now i boot the macbook into Windows 7 (boot camp). The external fw800 windows partition shows up. It is a simple task to copy the 25 gig worth of files from the external drive to another external drive hooked up (also a LaCie but firewire 400 formatted for windows). How long do you think this operation would take? I think i spend about 30 minutes last time i did it on Linux (in fairness the linux box has an e-sata connection).

Well, it's been 10 minutes and Windows is still thinking about the copy operation, it actually hasn't even started yet! And the copy dialog box estimates 16 hours! It says 'discovered' 5,764 items and then sits and sits and sits.

In fairness the previous osx copy was between laptop hard drive and external hard disk and this is from external hard disk to external hard disk but 16 hours?

When i do similar file operations on the windows 7 desktop it is slow and ties up the machine. How can that be on a dual 3.2 ghz xeon box with 4 cores? Obviously it is not hyperthreaded - why?

Update

It's 10:15 am the next day and 1,700 files still to be copied, says 9 hours to go! It finally completed this afternoon. I am now moving some files around on the external drive connected to the win 7 pc and every so often it has to re-read the directory from the drive. There is a green progress bar across the top of the file manager and it takes a couple of minutes to read the directory of the 1tb external. No wonder file operations take so long.

Windows 7 on the macbook pro

Today we try windows 7 ultimate on a macbook pro. I used to run xp some years ago on the original macbook but forgot to shut windows down one day and it did not go to sleep because of a buggy boot camp driver and ended up burning out the airport wireless. Let's see how we fare now.

There is no reason to run window 7 on this as it is running xp inside of osx (via virtualbox) anyway, but this gives me a laptop for just about anything.

The target machine is a 15" macbook pro with 4 gig ram, 250gig hard drive, intel core 2 duo running at 2.4 ghz and nvidia 8600m GT dedicated graphics. To make it run full speed we decide to go the boot camp route.

Boot camp no longer requires a cd/dvd, you run the book camp app in the utilities folder and decide how much hard disk space to allot to windows. I choose 50 gig. It then asks you to insert the windows install media and runs the windows 7 installation program. You choose advanced or optional setup and select a partition. Windows will complain it cannot install there as it is not the right format. We select drive 0 partition 3 boot camp and click on the windows disk utility and format the partition as NTFS.

Windows then formats the partition, copies over it's numerous files and starts the install. This takes quite a bit of time so we start a quick game of civ2...

finally we get to the setup and create an account and get to the home network. Odd how the win7 gui reminds me of an earlier version of osx.

Ok it starts up but the isight is not working. Network is ok. I'll have to find the drivers for the macbook for win 7 tomorrow...ah, if you run windows update it gets the driver for the video and some other things.

Once installed it boots automatically into windows. In the old boot camp there was a control panel in windows to set the boot back to osx, i don't see it anymore so how to return to osx? I found it in the control panel, system and security.

Ah, here is a good guide:

http://www.simplehelp.net/2009/01/15/using-boot-camp-to-install-windows-7-on-your-mac-the-complete-walkthrough/ which says to do this:

Insert your OS X Leopard (or Snow Leopard) DVD. When prompted, select Run setup.exe. Note: If you’re using Snow Leopard and a message pops up saying “Remote Install Mac OS X”, close that window and eject the CD. Put the CD in again and this time select “Open folder to view files”, navigate to the Bootcampfolder, and run setup.exe.

Looks like this is needed in able to get back to osx - as windows probably toasts the existing boot loader (why you need to install windows 1st before linux on a dual boot machine). So we haul out the 10.6 retail box and insert the dvd.

Works as advertised. Remember to remove the snow leopard cd before rebooting.

When your Mac boots, hold down the Option key to select which Operating System you want to boot into.

There will be 2 hard drive icons shown, your apple one and a hard drive called windows. Select the windows drive. Next we install the apple bootcamp update by running Apple Software update in windows. This loads ver 3.1 which updates some of the drivers.

The macbook gets a little hot during all this updating, i have a fan control applet in osx that cranks up the fans - need to find something similar for winddoze.

Summary

Windows 7 ultimate on a macbook pro looks nice and is fast. I must say the Aero window manager is very nice looking.

How useful windows 7 is remains to be seen, but because work is a windows-centric IT place i have to use it sometimes, although there is no longer any compelling reason to do so. Many years ago a windows upgrade would have been exciting, today it is ho hum as everything i need can be done is Ubuntu or OSX and in fact there are things i do there that i can't do easily in windows without purchasing a lot of software or fiddling around in windows innards. During the years windows tried to take over the world with phones, zune's, xboxes and such it lost sight of updating it's os and many people left for better options. Wonder if it will get them back? Probably not - would you return to IE after many years on Firefox and Safari?

PS

Ran the windows experience index and got a score of: 5.1 which is caused by the slower hard drive, the other scores were all 5.9

Upgrading the G4

We have an ancient 800mhz G4 ibook that is still quite useful as it is only 12" in size and is fairly light as the internal cd/dvd drive died and was removed. However, it cannot run any os later than 10.4 because the install program checks the cpu speed and if it is less than 867Mhz the program will not work.

However, there is a workaround, basically fake the cpu speed by reporting it to the OS as 900mhz.
First we goto http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/26562/leopardassist and download the leopard assist program. This sets up the trick and restarts the machine.

We hook up an external firewire drive and boot the install DVD from that. Click install and away we go...

and after a few minutes it is complete. So how does 10.5 run on an 800mhz G4 with 1.25mb of ram? not bad, i wouldn't run garageband on it but it does well as a web surfer and email machine.

Digitization of old CD's

Since i haven't played a CD in some years, i finally got around to getting rid of the dusty cd cabinet in the upstairs 'media room' sometimes called living room. As i boxed them up i realized there are some songs i don't have digital copies of so i will have to either spend time searching and downloading or digitizing them myself. Most of the stuff i have is eclectic so it is unlikely to be in an online music store.

Now that we are using Connect360 on the mac pro for all the existing MP3 files and Tversity on the windows server for all the FLAC's and movie files, there is no need to keep audio CD from long term storage. We will not be converting any audio cd's to MP3 but rather to the higher resolution FLAC as digital masters and then downconverting to MP3 as needed.

The problem is that i want to use the mac for ripping the CD's but i don't want to use iTunes for that. I want to rip to high resolution FLAC's and then convert to MP3's if needed. First we take a look at Max (http://sbooth.org/Max/) for OSX. While this is still beta (less than version 1.0) it has a lot of nice features. We set the output as FLAC to a folder on the external drive and insert and an audio CD. It gets the metadata from the net, rips and converts the files and ejects the disc, all in 3 minutes. Excellent!

Wonder if it supports multiple drives, i have a couple of Firewire external cd-rom drives, a plextor and a lacie i could hook up. All you would have to do is to feed it a CD every few minutes.

Audacity on OSX

Since last summer there is a new version 1.3.12 (beta) so we are going to use that in the lab. So off to http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ to download.

Hey the new book on Audacity 1.3 from PACKT just arrived as i typed this..how cool is that? Ok we download the 1.3.12.dmg file and open the disk image. We create an Audacity folder in Applications and copy all the files there.

Libraries

While audacity is good as is, it cannot handle MP3 and other files because of IP laws. So we need to download two libraries - LAME and FFmpeg. The LAME library file gets copied to the audacity folder and then in audacity you select audacity,preferences,libraries and click LOCATE and point it to the libmp3lame.dylib file. It will remember the location. FFmpeg comes in a dmg which has a pkg that can be installed. Once that is done click the LOCATE button for FFmpeg and it is automatically detected. Click OK and yer done.

One thing i am excited about is using Audacity to record telephone interviews using Skype or Google talk. I've finally got my external iSight camera hooked up to the mac pro (which replaced the dual G5 this spring) and it's quite impressive. Not as bright as the iSight in the mac pro notebook (which replaced the macbook this spring) but really nice.

Select Audacity, Preferences, Devices and select the iSight under Recording device. You also have to turn off all skype notifications.

Select Skype,Preferences and click the Notifications tab. Untick the Play Sound checkbox.

Enough for now..time for a snack

Greenstone on OSX

With more and more of our students using macs we decide to take another look at the osx version of Greenstone, now at 2.83 to see if it is usable. In the past, we recommended students stay away from the mac version and those who really, really want to use their macbook or iMac ended up installing boot camp, fusion or parallels and running greenstone in XP!

So we download the .dmg and click to install. It defaults to Users/yourusername/Greenstone. No way to change drives so it want to go on the sys drive. We decide that is ok and it gets ready to install. Note that to make greenstone actually work it has a number of dependencies. The problem in the past was users had to install and configure those dependent programs and it was not very straightforward. Now the gs installer adds apache automatically as well as installing imagemagick and ghostscript. Sweet.

We do not use the admin pages in the lab with the windows version but decide here to check it out so we tick the enable Admin pages checkbox and give it a password of admin. Click Install and away we go.

When finished we check out the greenstone folder - lots of files but which one launches the application? We click o nthe readmeEn.txt file for enlightenment...looks like the gli folder has the interface..ok but which file in there - client-gli.sh might be the bash script that runs the thing but how do you know? There is a gli.ico icon file...rather than click things at random hoping it will work, let's read the release notes. Ah....it says

On Mac and Linux, use a terminal (in Macs this is found under Applications > Utilities > Terminal) to go into the Greenstone installation directory and run

./gs2-server.sh

The small Greenstone Server will display. Run

./gli/gli.sh

To get to the Greenstone Librarian Interface

So we open a terminal window to the shell which puts us into our user directory (pwd will confirm where you are) so cd Greenstone/gli and then do ./gli.sh and joy - the usual gli interface launches. Since the gli is written in Java it is quite similar in windows, osx and linux.

One difference right at the start. You do file,new to define a collection and then have to do file,open to open the collection you just defined. We decide to test by creating a collection of midi files of Frank Zappa tunes. So we open the test collection and watch the spinner go round and round...this should not be. Ok it's crashed so we need to kill it.

Not impressed - let's try tomorrow to load the demo collection

XAMPP on the Mac

Last time we did 9713 it was not possible for students to access the web server so they could not copy their project there (for some security reason). We ended up uploading them to the class sharepoint. This time around we are thinking maybe we bypass this by using XAMPP 1.7.3 for the mac. There may be some issues:

The windows version which works on any drive as long as the xampp folder is in the root, so c:\xampp, e:\xampp, f:\xampp all work - in fact you can have multiple different copies of xampp on the same machine, a cheap version of the dev,qat,prd server model for development. The same process also works for xampplite and xampp and xampplite can be on the same drive as they have different folders. This is actually very useful as you can really play around without worrying about losing work.

Anyway, unfortunately the mac xampp version only works when installed to Applications. So we have to test this on lab machines and see what happens. Once installed you click the XAMPP control panel and start the apache,mySQL and even the ftp server. Of course, since you have access to the console you don't really need to ftp.

The students would then copy their content to the /Applications/XAMPP/htdocs folder and access them with Safari at http://localhost or depending on the lab setup they might be able to put their web content in their Home folder and goto http://localhost~username but i doubt if that has been set up.

We shall see...